Читать книгу Alchemy - Maureen Duffy - Страница 4

I’m sitting with my feet up on the desk pretending to be Philip Marlowe when the phone rings. Marlowe’s still the best when the phone hasn’t rung for days and the overdraft’s fast growing its fungoid web over the bank balance. Marlowe’s cool. I know Warshawski’s more my century. I ought to feel most at home with her but it’s Marlowe when the going gets tough. There’s just one problem though with my impersonation. By now I should have a tray full of dead butts. But I never learned how to inhale when we all tried it out in break at thirteen, behind the kitchen block where the smoke wouldn’t notice. And he was older than my mid thirties too. Forty at least; that was how Bogey played him anyway and he was the definitive.

‘Is that Lost Causes?’ The voice is light, male, what used to be called ‘cultured’.

‘It is.’

‘Do you do tribunals? Employment disputes?’

I do anything but I don’t say so. ‘Would you be applying for legal aid?’

“That won’t be necessary. Will you represent me?’

‘I need to see clients before I commit myself.’

‘Who am I speaking to? Would it be you taking my case?’

‘My name is Green, Jade Green. We’d better make an appointment Mr…?’

‘Dr Gilbert, Adrian Gilbert. I feel…if it could be as early as possible.’

‘Is tomorrow too soon?’ I try to keep any eagerness out of my voice.

‘Not at all. That will suit me very well.’

‘Ten o’clock then?’

‘Excellent.’

‘Just tell me who the plaintiff is?”

‘Defendant. The defendant is the University of Wessex. Till tomorrow,’ and he’s gone.

While he was speaking I’d opened a case file under his name and then this second one. I keep two files: the first I let the client see and the other is for myself, encrypted so that, in theory, only I have access, except that any twelve-year-old hacker could probably be into it quick as a traditional cat burglar up a drainpipe.

Next I run a check on him. Nothing in criminal listings. Nothing in the medical file. Not that sort of a doctor then or at least not accredited. Idly I try a general search by name. And bingo. ‘Adrian Gilbert. Died 1604.’ Oh great, ‘Uterine brother to Sir Walter Raleigh.’ So my guy is either an impostor or a fantasist.

I try the University of Wessex. I’ve never heard of it but I see it has its own website, the minimum requirement for existence nowadays, as a validation, a sure sign that you’re in business and up there with the big boys. Founded 1999. Not redbrick. Not even old poly. A private Thatcherite-style endowment, on the site of a former teacher training college. On the fringes of a London dormitory that might just qualify it for the Wessex brand. A ‘uni’ only in name. My intellectual snobbery is showing. We are the last generation who can afford it. Who am I to judge now, in these shapeshifting days?

Wessex campus is split between several sites. They show us a picture of the chapel. Nineteenth-century basilica style, a brick rotunda that must have been part of the original college, dedicated to St Walburgha. A fast train service to London every half hour: commutable. A global pharmaceutical giant has its base in the town and helps to fund the science faculty. Wessex offers the usual mishmash of courses, from artificial intelligence to sports tourism, boasting of its something for everyone policy. I wonder which of these Dr Adrian Gilbert fits into. I scroll through the list of subjects but it doesn’t name the teaching staff. Just as I’m about to click off I spot theology almost at the end of the line, with only tourism and youth studies tagging along behind. It stands out in its long gown and Geneva bands like silk bloomers among the Knickerbox flimsies. Well, tomorrow I’ll find out. It’s time to change into my leathers, get my boots on, helmet, gloves and wheel out the bike for my evening delivery. If Dr Adrian Gilbert could see me now would he be impressed or would he want to withdraw his case?

The Chinese takeaway I deliver for is a small family business in a quiet suburb. When their only son decided to try his luck in Australia they lost their errand boy. ‘Why,’ I asked when I’d been there a couple of months, ‘why me?’ There must have been plenty of young immigrants, students even, from Hong Kong families applying for the job in Loot. Mr Gao’s pale face with its delta of wrinkles had smiled fleetingly. ‘You are not Chinese; you are girl. There are many bad people run Chinese takeaway delivery. Deliver drugs, demand money. They don’t trouble you English girl.’

I found it hard to believe the triads had moved in on carriers of egg fried rice and bean curd but if Mr Gao thought so it was enough. They were a quiet close family, apart from Tommy who got away. Mr and Mrs Gao cook in the steaming, succulent kitchen behind, with a clashing of woks and metal pans. Mary takes the orders in the shop and over the phone. She’s shy and plain. Probably she would have liked to marry and have children but who is there for her to meet in Streatham Hill, unless a visiting cousin? I flirt with her a little when I call for my orders but I don’t think she understands. She ducks her head and smiles at me under her deep fringe, shadowing the liquorice pupils which are her only claim to attraction. As a young girl she must have had acne that’s left her skin lumpy and pitted. Sometimes I imagine putting my lips to it and saying: ‘It’s okay; you’re beautiful.’ At the end of my stint she hands me my brown paper carrier with the little silver oblong dishes under their cardboard caps that hold my freebie supper. Every night there’s something different so that I’m never sated. Mary always remembers what I’ve had the night before.

I didn’t mean to put all this in, even for my eyes only. The program asks me if I want to save it when I try to shut down. The ghost in the machine prompts us all the time to consider our own motives, our needs, our desires. If you don’t save, all will be lost. And yet it can always be found. Confiscated by the police, the computer gives up its secrets like any prisoner singing under the lash, rack, thumbscrew, electric prod, Chinese water torture. So why shouldn’t I save it just for myself? What have I got to hide?

Dr Gilbert buzzes the intercom on the dot of ten, before I’ve even got my feet up. My office is home as well as workplace but he isn’t to know that yet. Behind the desk is a partition with a door in it that leads to the kitchen, shower room and my student-style bedsit. Originally a warehouse, it was converted at the end of the nineties, leaving exposed minimalist steel girders and yellow London Brick walls. In its own way it’s related to the Wessex campus. Gilbert should feel at home. I tell him to come up. As yet there’s no lift, only stone steps and iron banisters.

When he puts his head round the door I see he’s a youngish Dr Who, collar-length brown hair, bow tie and granny glasses. As I get up he comes forward putting out a hand of slim manicured fingers.

‘I’m very grateful to you for seeing me so soon.’

‘Have a chair. Would you like a coffee?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Not at all.’ I go over to the filter machine where the glass goldfish bowl is gently seething. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘Just milk thank you.’

I turn back from my coffee maker with our steaming cups. I can see he’s ‘all of a twitch’, as my mother would say. I’m afraid he might drop the cup and scald himself but he gets it safely down on my desk. ‘Did you find me easily, the office I mean?’ I’m trying to reassure him, to give him time to gather his wits. I guess he’s not used to the paraphernalia of the law.

‘I looked it up in the A-Z. I used to know London quite well but you get out of the habit…’

I open the top drawer of my desk and take out pad and pen. ‘I’ll need to make some notes.’

‘Of course. Where shall I begin?’

‘Tell me first about you. Date of birth, full name, address.’

The recitation of these simple facts steadies him. I could put them straight into my laptop of course but this sometimes frightens people, especially older people and Gilbert comes into that category though he’s only forty-nine. It’s more a cast of mind.

He takes me methodically through his degree and previous employment, before we get to Wessex and the immediate problem.

‘I have been accused by a small group of students of trying to corrupt their minds by teaching Satanism and perversion.’

Long ago when I started in independent practice I wanted to put up a favourite cartoon of mine showing the inside of a confessional box, with a monk leaning forward to listen to the supplicant on the other side of the grille and a sign above the monk’s head which reads: ‘Do not sound too surprised.’

‘Dangerous allegations.’

‘Very dangerous. I was summoned before the dean and disciplinary council. It was the students’ word against mine. They were believed. I was suspended and sacked.’

‘Sacked?’

‘I was on a short-term contract. When my first suspension ran out I expected to return to college, and my teaching, but a second suspension was slapped on, that took me to the end of my contract. I was told it would not be renewed.’

‘Why should the dean and council have believed them rather than you? Couldn’t you get other students to testify in your favour?’

‘They were too frightened. Ms Green…’ Gilbert hesitates, ‘you may find this hard to believe. You may even think it is mere paranoia on my part, but the college has been taken over by a sect, a fundamentalist group.’

‘What sort of sect?’ Far from suspecting him of paranoia, I see shades of the Rushdie fatwa rushing towards me, and find myself less than enthralled at letting loose a whole farrago of death threats, riot and arson. Still, a job is a job.

‘Extreme evangelical Christian.’

‘Creationist, Happy-Clappy?’ I’m showing off a bit.

‘Neither. This is something new. From America. The mother church, as they call it, has put money into the University of Wessex. The dean is their appointee. Many of the students are American.’

‘In these days of the internet, sects tend to be global. Didn’t the last immolation take place in Switzerland?’

‘There was a later one, in Zambia I seem to remember, but in both cases the cult originated in the States or had US links.’

‘Those students who accused you, are they American?’

‘Some of them. Not all. What would be their position in English law? Would it make a difference that they aren’t British subjects?’

‘The college must abide by UK employment law if it’s within the UK.’

‘So I can take them to an industrial tribunal?’

‘Employment tribunal. Yes, at this preliminary stage, as far as I can see. But I should warn you, Dr Gilbert, that going to law is often at the very least a disappointment, if not a down-right mistake. Think of Oscar Wilde, not to mention others in our own time. What exactly did the students allege?’

‘There were many things, among them that I distributed pornographic material to them.’

‘And did you?’

‘One person’s pornography is another’s truth. For example there was a poem about an erotic relationship between a Roman soldier and Christ on the cross which was prosecuted as an “obscene libel”. I think that was the term. You are too young to remember the case.’

‘But not too young to have studied it, if only for its rarity. Did the material you distributed fall into that category?’

‘Not quite.’

‘You said you were accused of Satanism. What exactly is your subject, Dr Gilbert?’

‘This particular course is on the history of science showing how it developed from earlier disciplines…’

‘Like?’

‘What some would call alchemy.’

‘And you? What would you call it?’

‘Proto-chemistry is a less emotive term. The great Liebig himself said that to him alchemy was merely the chemistry of the Middle Ages.’

I was remembering the big old Liebig condenser in a glass case in the school lab like some medieval retort.

‘The alchemists have had a pretty bad press since Ben Jonson, as charlatans and cheats.’

‘You are familiar with the work of Jonson, Ms Green? Somewhat unusual in a lawyer I should have thought.’

‘I only switched to law halfway through my degree. I began with the humanities.’

‘And why was that?’The tables have been suddenly and subtly turned. I’m now the one being questioned.

‘I decided there was no money in teaching English literature at ‘A’ level until I qualify for a pension. I would find that life too…’

‘Dull? Believe me, Ms Green, in my experience the academic life can be far from dull.’

‘I need to see a copy of the material you distributed.’ Perhaps he had been foolish, had thought young minds were more flexible, instead of less, often rigid with preconceptions, and fear of humiliation or exposure to the unknown. At thirty-six I’m a lot mellower, more tolerant than I was at sixteen.

‘It wasn’t just the material I distributed. That should have been harmless enough. After all I’m not a complete fool. I know about the duty of care and in loco parentis. I’ll give you copies of course but the real damage, the evidence used against me, came from what I didn’t circulate, that was stolen from my briefcase when I left it, carelessly I now realise, lying on a desk during a coffee break. Someone must have photocopied the lot and put the original back.’

‘Then it wasn’t stolen?’

‘The theft of intellectual property by illegal copying is a crime.’

‘Yes of course but one that’s hard to prove. What exactly was copied?”

‘Stolen. It’s a manuscript.’

‘By you?’

‘No, no. It dates back to the early seventeenth century.’

‘Then it’s no longer in copyright.’

‘But it’s mine. I am the owner.’

‘I think we would find it difficult to make much of a case out of that. I’m sorry, we’ll need something better, stronger.’

‘But the use to which it was put, to discredit me, blacken my reputation.’

‘I shall need to see it before I can go any further, decide whether to take your case, whether I think you indeed have a case.’ I see him wilt but I’m determined to get back the initiative in this interview.

‘Surely I qualify as a lost cause.’

‘Even with a cause that seems lost I have to see at least a chance of winning, otherwise I wouldn’t make a living.’ There’s no need to tell him about the night job. ‘I work on a no win no fee basis you see.’

‘I’m willing to pay you a retainer, just for your advice and…and support. Since this began I’ve felt very isolated, alone.’

‘You’re not married?’

‘No, and you?’

I hold up my ringless left hand. ‘When can you let me have the material?’

He opens his briefcase and takes out a thick wad, bound in a blue plastic cover. ‘I have a copy here.’

‘How do I know it’s the same as the original?’

“You’ll have to trust me. The original is in cipher. This is a kind of translation.’

‘You know the one thing you must never do is lie to your lawyer.’

‘I’m well aware of that. And in any case where would be the point?’

‘And this is the same document as was stolen from your briefcase, copied and returned?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Who do you believe stole it?’

‘Oh I know. It was the secretary of the Temple of the Latent Christ.’

‘The Temple of Christ?’

‘The Latent Christ. That’s what they call themselves.’

‘The name of the secretary?’

‘Mary-Ann Molders.’ He spells it out for me.

‘And she went to the dean and made the allegations against you that led to your being suspended? Were they of a sexual nature?’

‘She alleged that I was encouraging students to take part in rituals that had a sexual element.’

‘Did you?’

‘I told them about allegations in which alchemists were lumped together with witches. Both were prepared to predict the future, like present-day newspaper astrologers. Both made their living by supplying potions, love philtres, the Viagra of the day. All substances were permissible in providing what we would now call pharmaceuticals. Poppy, mandragora, meadowsweet, St John’s wort, sedatives, hallucinogens were all perfectly legal. Substances and procedures for affecting the minds and bodies of people and animals were sold all the time. Some of them were harmless, some to us would be disgusting, others are now outlawed.’

‘Did Mary-Ann Molders accuse you of encouraging the use of illegal substances as well?’

‘She did.’

‘Do you yourself use drugs?’

‘Like many people, I have used them. I’ve smoked some pot.’

‘And did you advocate their use?’

‘I might have been, shall we say, a little iconoclastic in my approach. I wanted my students to think, not just to accept what they were told.’

‘Would you say your style inclines to the satirical? That you like to provoke? That perhaps you are anti-authority?’

‘I believe a university education shouldn’t be a matter of spoon-feeding material into students’ heads. Life is more complex than that.’

I sense a certain arrogance in Dr Adrian Gilbert. ‘At the moment I can’t see that you have a legal leg to stand on to take an action to a tribunal.’ I watch him sag a little. Why am I saying this? There’s nothing in the in-tray. I need the money and I need to practise my profession, my craft. I pick up the plastic folder. ‘I’ll look at this and consider what you’ve told me and be in touch. I may make some enquiries of my own.’

‘Thank you, Ms Green. I am most grateful. How much do I owe you so far?’ He’s taking out his cheque-book.

I hesitate. But the rent is due at the end of the month.

‘The Law Society recommends standard minimum fees. I think we should stick to those.’

‘Of course.’

I tell him the rate per hour for a practising solicitor of four years’ standing. He writes the cheque without a quibble. Now he has me signed up, he thinks. We’ll see.

As soon as he’s out of the door, I open the typed document and read: The Memorial of Amyntas Boston.

This is the true memorial of Amyntas Boston now confined to Salisbury gaol for witchcraft, the which I deny, and writ in cipher as my father used for his own receipts, which is the common practice among those who call themselves the Sons of Hermes. Some would say that I am a witch by birth since they allege my father practised necromancy. He was a learned man, a magus and a chemist but no cheat or cozener or in league with the evil one. The countess would have had him live in her house as others did, the better to consult with him in her own laboratory, but he would not, for he valued his freedom too much and his pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. So he brought me up to labour alongside him, not at the furnace or the bellows, for which he had his laborant Hugh Harnham, for he said the heat of it would blacken my skin and the fumes cause me to faint, but in wiping his brow and limbs, and bringing him food and drink as he sweat much. For in seeking the stone that is the in principia of transmutation, he said only heat would do the trick of turning base metal into gold, and all things into each other, according to the laws of mutability. As the poet Spenser has it that ‘e’en the earth Great Mother of us all’ does change in some sort even though she be not in thrall to mutability, and if the earth why not all things else. It wants only the key to unlock and enter the innermost mystery. For this work I was clad only in my shirt and britches with wooden sandals to raise my feet above the hot cinders of the floor.

As there are those who keep watch for comets all night so my father laboured many hours together, for they who seek the stone, the adepts, are possessed by this search and nothing is for them beyond it, except that they must gain their bread as others do. And for this, which was the preparation of unguents, plaisters, syrups, and draughts to summon Morpheus, I took my full share to free him for the Great Work.

I therefore learned all that he could teach me of these mysteries so that when he died and the countess summoned me and demanded of me what skill I had, I could answer truthfully that, except for that art of transmutation which he kept secret even from me, aside from what I could see with my own eyes as he laboured at the furnace, I could do all those things she desired which was to assist her in her own concoctions. My father had been dead but a fortnight when she sent her servant to find me out and bid me come to Ivychurch, her house, where she then was in mourning, the earl himself being dead only three months.

I was led into her chamber where she was seated against the window so that when I looked at her I was dazzled by her beauty, for the light beaming through the lace of her ruff she was as it were haloed, and at every point winked sparklets of crystal from the pearls and precious stones that adorned it.

‘Come here child,’ she said. ‘I could not have your father. Shall I have you instead?’

‘As my lady pleases,’ I answered.

‘My lady does please then. I shall keep you here or Dr Gilbert may be jealous to have you underfoot at Wilton. Do you know Dr Gilbert child?’

‘My father spoke of him madam. And sometimes they would meet at the Pheasant to talk of chemical matters.’ I did not say my father had called him very sarcastic and a great buffoon but that his relation to Sir Walter Raleigh, he was his half-brother by the same mother, gave him the licence of speaking his mind to all, both great and little.

‘What do they call you child Boston?’ I hung my head and did not answer. ‘Come now child, you must have a name. What did your father call you?’

‘Sometimes one thing madam, sometimes another.’

‘Shall I lose patience with you? What things?’

‘Sometimes Amyntas madam and sometimes…’

‘Yes?’

‘Amaryllis.’

‘He was not such a great philosopher as I supposed then, since he did not know the sex of his own child.’

‘When he was engaged in the Great Work madam, he was forgetful of all else.’

‘Come closer and let me look at you.’

I did as she commanded and as soon as I was near enough she took my chin in her white hand and turned my head first to the right and then to the left. I could smell her scent which I recognised as a distillation of roses with some other sweetness such as jasmine admixed. ‘How old are you?’

‘Near sixteen madam.’

‘And yet there is no sign of hair upon your lip or chin. What is the mystery of these names? What did your mother call you?’

‘Nothing madam. She died in giving birth to me, and my twin brother who died with her.’ I paused.

‘Go on.’

‘He was christened Amyntas.’

‘And you are Amaryllis? Yet you dress as your brother were he alive. Do you always so?’

‘No madam. When visitors came to see my father’s house I dressed in female attire to attend my father.’

‘But were not the neighbours and his friends puzzled?’

‘He had no family madam. And the neighbours believed there were still two of us.’

‘And you, what do you believe?’

‘Sometimes when I look in the glass I do not know who looks back at me. Whichever I am carries the other inside.’

‘Such confusion we find in dreams or in the fancies of the play, where boy plays girl playing boy. Which would you choose?’

‘I cannot say madam.’

‘One day the choice will be forced on you. For now we will continue with the game. Do you bleed child?’

‘No my lady.’

‘Strange. I bled at thirteen. Well you shall be Amyntas, my page and assistant, when we are alone here at Ivychurch, or even in Ramsbury, but at Wilton, the great house, or in London if we should go there, you shall put on your woman’s clothes and not be noticed among the press of other maids. Shall you like this game child Boston?’

‘If my lady pleases.’

‘As she does. Can you read aloud child?’

‘Yes madam. I read often to my father, both in our own tongue and from the Latin works of the chemical masters as Paracelsus and Nicholas Flammel.’

‘Then you shall read to me. I have a humour to hear my brother, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Do you know his book? It is many years since I have opened it, when last I closed it for the printer, at the end of my labours to restore his work to the world in full. I have a mind to visit it again now that I am alone and my time is my own.’

‘My lady is still young. She may marry again.’

‘I am the age now the earl was when he married me but it is not the same for women. A ripe man may marry a young maid who will give him children as I did. And you are the age I was when I was espoused to him after two years at court in her majesty’s service. Sir Philip, my brother, wrote of passion between young lovers but I have never known it. Only duty. Yet a woman must marry, and not be too picky in her choice, for without marriage she has no domain, no power. When he was away the earl left all things in my hands. I have had, you could say, my own little court far removed from London. All this will change now, changes already, and will change more when I am just the dowager and mother of the earl and my son takes a wife to be his countess. Enough of sighing, come my young Amyntas-Amaryllis let me hear you read to judge whether your voice and your understanding be good enough for my brother’s words.’

So began my new life in the lady’s household as it moved here and there between her domains, now in London, at Barnard’s Castle or at her three country estates in Wiltshire or in Wales at Cardiff Castle. The young earl was still in disgrace with the queen for he had got her lady-in-waiting, Mistress Fitton, with child yet would not marry her. It was said Mrs Fitton had tucked up her clothes and gone out from the court disguised as a man in a white cloak to meet her lover. The child was born dead and Earl William, after a stay in the Fleet, banished to Wilton, where he moped about the house. His mother could not forgive him and kept herself apart while he wrote begging letters to Sir Robert Cecil to be taken back into her majesty’s favour and given some small posts which his father had held, and be freed of the royal wardship he suffered rather than enjoyed. I was glad not to go to Wilton in my maid’s clothes at this time, for the young earl was said to be immoderately given up to women.

In the mornings my lady prayed privately and read from her own book of psalms which she and her noble brother had made together. Then when we had breakfasted on milk, white bread and honey we went to our work in the laboratory where we made medicines from all kind of herbs, seeds and minerals, both salves, cordials and other potions.

I would chop and grind the ingredients with pestle and mortar, then transfer them according to her instructions to the limbec for distilling into the liquors that gleamed bright as gemstones, sapphire, emerald, ruby or the garnet yellow of sulphurous emetics from her own receipt ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Vomit’ for purging.

There were many little drawers with clay boxes of substances such as I knew from my father, already powdered: saltpetre and opiates, poppy and St John’s wort, saffron, and spices from the East, sandalwood, spikenard or our own meadowsweet that brings a merry heart.

After, her patients would come to her with all manner of complaints and sicknesses: ulcers, wounds, bruises, ills of every member and part of the body and we would apply the salves, plaisters and dressings or mix up fresh remedies to cleanse the insides, or wash the skin or eyes, and to dispel melancholy. When she had attended to her own family there would come those from the town and the villages round about because of her reputation for skill and kindness.

All this I helped her in and also was at her side when she wrought at the business of the household and her estates, writing letters and paying bills and keeping her diurnal of instructions and accounts for food and drink, bed-linen and clothing, tutors’ and stewards’ reports, for her hand was in everything, great and small. Sometimes she would sigh and regret the days of her youth when she, her noble brother and her ladies would laugh and read together, lolling on the grass under the trees, or be pleasantly busy at their writings.

Other times though we were all merry enough: the ladies at their cushions and tapestries according to her pattern, for she is the finest needlewoman in England at making hangings of her own devising to adorn the walls and beds of Wilton, and other her houses. As they worked I would read aloud or Signor Ferrabosco, the younger, as he was known still even though his father had long returned to his native Italy, would play upon his lute and sing of his own composing. But best of all I came to like those times when we were alone together and I read to her from the Arcadia or she opened her heart to me and talked of past, present or future cares. Then some about her began to be envious that she should spend so much time on her page and labourant who was not of noble birth. I thought I heard whisperings, words that broke off at my appearance, small acts of spite, as drink spilled by my elbow jogged when I had fresh clothes on, the toughest cuts of meat and smallest portions, and sometimes rough teasing from her ladies when she was absent. Once I heard one say that she had loved her brother too well and was like to make the same mistake again.

Then one day she sent two of her ladies to fetch me from the laboratory when I was alone, Mistress Marchmont an old duenna, and the young Mistress Griffiths, the countess had fetched from Cardiff at her mother’s request that she might be polished for marriage and found a husband.

‘Why Master Boston,’ the old one said, ‘you must leave your potions and devil’s cookery and come to our lady the countess.’

‘Can you make love philtres Master Boston?’ the young one asked, ‘for they say you have bewitched our lady. Make me a potion that will do the same for the young earl and when I am married I will reward you handsomely.’

I saw that I must be cautious. ‘Alas madam, there is no such thing or all physicians would be rich men.’

‘They say your father was a great necromancer seeking the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Is that what you and my lady do here together?’ She began to open the many little drawers of the cabinet and put in a delicate finger.

‘Be careful madam for many of those substances, tasted by those who do not know their properties, are strong poisons that will harm you.’

‘But they are safe in your hands Master Boston. You understand them. They say that when your father’s house was cleared after his death there was found a great quantity of eggshells used in transmutation.’

‘I have never seen my father use such.’

‘What is this transmutation you all seek? Is it not against God’s will that things should become what he has not made them, as gold from base metal, or that men should live for ever?’

‘Nothing can be done without it is God’s will. He has made all things, even the earth itself as the poet Spenser has it, subject to mutability in some degree. We must therefore call it a divine principle.’

‘Unless it be of the devil and witchcraft. Are you a priest, Master Boston, to decide such matters? When were you at the university? Or perhaps you learnt such supernatural counsels from your father’s divinations.’

‘My father was a physician and chymist madam, and no magician.’

‘And have you never seen things change their nature or spirits arise?’

‘Both those things are possible, but by the workings of nature not the charms of magicians. Look I will show you.’ I placed a little heap of salts of mercury in a clay dish and put it over a small fire we kept always burning to heat water for cordials. ‘Now watch.’

They both drew near. ‘It is liquefying.’ The duenna, who had not spoken since her first words summoning me to my lady, stared into the dish. ‘It is becoming silver.’

‘No madam, only quicksilver by the agency of the fire. Think how cold changes water to solid ice that men may walk upon or snow that drops from the sky and when it melts there is just a little, little water on the ground from a whole hill of snow, which is bound together into crystals and thence into ice rocks, only from a drift of cloud feathers.’

‘You are poet as well as chymist, Master Boston, or rather magician truly for there is witchcraft in words which can steal into the heart and head just as potently as poppy closes the eyes. Our lady will wonder that we stay so long. Come. Can you arise spirits in a bottle as Master Forman does? He is a great distiller of love philtres and the ladies flock to him now he is gone to London.’

I had heard my father speak of this Simon Forman who was born at Quidhampton in our own country, but a half mile from Wilton. ‘He grows rich then at the expense of the credulous. There is nothing to love philtres but the longing, and the belief of them that take them. So my father taught me. Love comes from the heart not the stomach.’

‘Some say it springs rather from the loins.’

‘Lust is of the loins.’

‘And some young men would say the better for it. Ask Mistress Fitton where love and lust are joined. You must be still a virgin Master Boston.’

I felt my cheeks redden under this assault so that I feared for my disguise and answered rashly, ‘As I trust you are and as your husband will surely discover on your wedding night.’

‘You are impertinent. You at least shan’t have the discovery. Others should hear of your speaking above your station.’

Then I remembered that she claimed to come from a sometime line of Welsh princes and knew she would complain of me to my lady. But she would do it privately, behind my back.

The duenna laughed at our jousting. ‘Green children you spit like cats in autumn. We have kept our mistress waiting too long.’ And she led the way out of the laboratory.

As the days passed I came to understand that Mistress Griffiths was half inclined to make trial of me herself and when I read to them from Sir Philip’s Arcadia of the beauties of the naked and shipwrecked youth, Musidorus, then I found her eyes upon me in speculation if I should raise mine from the page. But I did so only to look upon my mistress, the countess, her face.

Last night, under the spell of Amyntas Boston’s memorial I suppose, or the weird case I might be embarking on, I dreamt I was that gladiator girl they dug up in Southwark in Great Dover Street. Outside the city wall, beside the highway and about my age. They think she was a rich pagan buried with eight lamps to light her on her way. Anubis lamps, that may just mean she was a devotee of Isis some academics claim, wanting to take away her status as gladiator, to deny the existence of fighting women. When they first dug her up there was a fierce battle of words, articles, letters, interviews flying back and forth, ‘She was: she wasn’t. They did, they didn’t.’ The archaeologists found a piece of pelvic bone in the grave, female, and then lost it. Was it really lost, suppressed, stolen? Talisman or uncomfortable evidence? Someone said Petronius had written of women gladiators so I looked up his Satyricon and there it was: a girl at the games fighting in a chariot like Boadicea. But weren’t most of the male gladiators criminals, who’d been given a last chance to fight to their deaths? Where did the women come from? Were they criminals too or just captives from some war, offered the choice of slavery and prostitution or the sword? I can’t find out. Those are the kind of references the early Christian copyists would have silently let drop, along with most of Sappho.

How much truth was there in the stories of the Amazons, cutting off a breast so they could swing their swords more easily, exposing their boy babies to death in the jaws of wild beasts on the rocky hillsides of Turkey? They don’t put that in the tourist brochures. At Halicarnassus they’re still fighting in stone on the wall, brave as lionesses behind their shields. Queen Penthesilea fell at Troy after leading her troops successfully against the Greeks. The brute Achilles killed her and then fell for her corpse.

I start up the bike and head off for the China Kitchen. Tonight I have Gilbert’s money and don’t need to work but I can’t let the Gaos down. I find them anxious and depressed. A shop next to theirs that has been empty for months has suddenly been let. Rumour has it it’s to be a rival Chinese takeaway but bigger. Already workmen are hacking the heart out of it, and Mr Gao has seen stoves and hobs being ferried into the newly plastered shell.

I try to reassure them. No one can compete with Mrs Gao’s chicken chow mein, her sweet and sour pork, her crispy aromatic duck, her sauced king prawns. They have their regulars for home delivery, some as I know from a longish way off, and the locals who’ve come there since the seventies when the Gaos first opened up. I wonder silently whether Mary herself sees a little light in this sudden darkness, that life might be different, Streatham Hill left behind at last and Bruce Lee’s successor kicking down first the door and then the counter to carry her off. If she does she doesn’t voice any such rebellion but shares her parents’ worried expressions.

Tonight my saddlebox is packed full for a dinner party in Clapham Old Town’s elegant heart where the tele presenter and his architect wife will boast over the steaming dishes, transferred daintily to the blue and white bowls and salvers, of ‘this little place we always go to, so authentic’.

‘Hi, Jade,’ Diana Bosco says as she opens the door. ‘How’s it going?’ She takes the thick brown paper carrier bags I hand her, without waiting for an answer. The first time she saw me helmeted in the dazzling burst of security light, she stepped back quickly, half closing the door on its chain. I took off my helmet.

‘Oh my God, I was really afraid back there but you’re a girl. I get so nervous opening up after dark. Will you always bring our order? I’ll feel much safer if you do. In future I’m going to ask if you’re on that night before I get in the food.’

‘I don’t work at weekends unless there’s an emergency.’

‘What about Friday?’ She flashes out the question.

‘I’m there on Fridays as a rule.’

‘Then that’s when we’ll have our dinner parties.’

So I bring her comfort food and she makes the gesture of concern that salves her conscience, and doesn’t ask whether I like to ride around in the dark and cold, and often wet, or skidding on the mush of fallen plane leaves big as saucers, like the dog’s eyes in the fairy tale, with rain slashing at my face through the visor and the other traffic trying to crush or shoulder me into the gutter.

Tonight it’s clear and moonlit. The rest of my drops are in a tight radius from the kitchen, out and back, out and back, out and back. This is the boring bit when you begin to lose concentration, cut familiar corners. At last I drop off the final order and am free to head home with my own supper in the box behind. Coming out I had to weave through cars, buses and vans fleeing the city. Now the road’s almost deserted. I ride by the lit pub windows of Brixton with their customers aswim inside like koi or darker mullet, and jostling queues for clubs held back by brawny bouncers: thin-clothed kids shivering in the damp air. I zoom on past the drowsing Oval and into the theatreland of Old and New Vics where the Thai and Italian restaurants are still packed and noisy. Their doors open to let in the post-play crowd and let out the wafts of garlic, olive oil, wine and coffee to sting the palates of passers-by. Then it’s into the grim underpass beside the glass canopy and grandiose steps of Waterloo Station, the automatic gunfire of my engine bouncing back off walls and roof, and down to my own train-shaken pad. I haul the bike into its ground-floor garage and climb up to my familiar shell, wondering again what was warehoused inside these walls to be trained down to Dover or what exotics could have waited here to be carried off. One day I mean to look it all up and know for sure. I peel off my leathers and run my hand through my hair flattened by the helmet.

In the back kitchen I get an open bottle of Pinot Grigio out of the fridge, pour myself a big glass while a plate is warming, lay out my silvery dishes, spoon and chopsticks, and switch on the late review to watch while I eat. The interviewer is nagging and prodding, pulling on a hangnail of dispute in the hope of drawing blood. With half my mind I’m turning over Gilbert’s case and what I’ve had time to read of Amyntas Boston’s memorial. So far it’s hard to see the harm in it. But then it’s all a matter of viewpoint and selection. What exactly did Gilbert distribute to his students and what commentary did he give them on the material? I pull a sheet of paper towards me and start to put down questions I should ask him. And suddenly I realise that I’m already hooked. In my head I’ve taken on this case I don’t really understand or see the shape of. I want more background.

I’ll run another check on the website for Wessex Uni but I think I need more than they may decide to tell me, more than the acceptable face of the college in competition with all its rivals. I need to go there, see for myself, get the feel. I finish my plateful, put the cardboard lids over the remains to be heated up for lunch tomorrow, pressing down the frilled soft metal rims, and stack the little dishes in the fridge. Then I go through to my office to surf for Wessex and input my thinking so far.

Is it Amyntas Boston’s memorial that’s turning this, that ought to be just case notes, into a diary, a commonplace book of my own? I must watch myself. I’m in danger of becoming one of those dreary, pitiful loners whose only relationships are on screen, pseudonymous trawlings. ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ That was in our GCE set-book anthology. The last lines had a bleakness I still remember in moments when they might be best forgotten.

And how the silence surged softly backward

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

There were ghostly listeners in that otherwise empty house, like the silent observers of messages we send out into cyberspace, that can log on to you, track you down and even offer you stuff you haven’t asked for, porn sites and cheap fags, enticements to fly away or join a cult.

Tomorrow I’ll pay Wessex a visit. It can’t take more than an hour from London. What excuse can I give to get on to the campus if they’re very security minded? I could be considering enrolling for a course, needing application forms and a full brochure, more than I can download from their website. Or I could be delivering something. A letter to the principal. Make a note of his name: the Revd Luther Bishop. Or I could just ring for an interview with him. Tell the truth. Say I’ve been asked to represent Dr Gilbert and I want to hear his, the college’s, side of the case. Tell the truth until you’re forced to lie.

He might refuse to see me or it might take time to get an appointment. I need to be doing something. After all this is potentially the most interesting case I’ve had since I set up on my own. True it’s only a tribunal not a full court or even magistrates’ but compared with the messy divorce settlements, hedge and right of way claims, conveyancing and inheritance squabbles that have come my way it is High Court stuff. I can see me as a legal Lara Croft slaying ghostly monsters or Buffy slapping down vampires, except that I’m not sure Gilbert isn’t himself some kind of shapechanger or at least charlatan.

Already I’m empathising with that dead girl, Amyntas Boston. If she was tried for witchcraft who did she have to defend her? What would I plead if I could go back to her time and her trial? I wouldn’t be allowed of course. In spite of Portia, who anyway had to dress up as a young man, not many women would have had the knowledge, let alone the chance, to stand up in court except as witnesses or defendants.

‘A Daniel come to judgement. O wise young judge.’ What was Shakespeare getting at with his boy, girl, boy impersonations, especially there in The Merchant? That it was all right to pretend, to lie, to turn nature and society upside down in the interest of justice? Or was it just about what women will do for love? None of the guys in the play are worthy of her. Won’t she get bored with Bassanio after a few years of marriage and children? So many of the plays call out for a sequel, a what happens next to his Olivia, Rosalind, Kate, Beatrice. Maybe they’ll be widowed and take over the running of vast estates like Amyntas Boston’s countess. It’s the soft ones he provides an endstop to with death: Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona.

Then there’s the female physician in what’s it called, who cures the king and gets her man as reward. Maybe he based cool women like that on the Mistress Fittons he saw around the court, flouting convention in a flurry of cloak and feathered bonnet.

Amyntas Boston’s final sentences I read last night sound as if s/he was falling in love with the countess, a Cherubino or Rose Cavalier situation, the kind of admission you’d pounce on in court. ‘Please turn to File E, item 29. Have you got it? Please read it carefully. Do you recognise those words? Do you remember writing them? What precisely did you mean by them?’ Is this the witchcraft Amyntas was accused of, where the beloved becomes pure gold and everything else is dross? Until you find only food’s gold and a heart turned to stone.

I shut down the file. Tomorrow, I’ll have an expedition to Wessex. There’s a bus from the station and to the campus if I don’t want to bike it and risk frightening the horses in my helmet and leathers. On the other hand it would be good to roar up like Nemesis or the US cavalry. Or a witch on a motorised broomstick if that’s what they want to see.

In the end I’ve decided for the full frontal and I’m on my way this morning, a dark wedge parting the air, at one with my bike, like any centaur, except that I have to feel she’s both metal and flesh. On a bike you ride astride. With a scooter you’ve got your legs together. Next stop sidesaddle. Did witches straddle or sidesit on their broomsticks? I’m in danger of falling into verse, a kind of incantation, as I zoom down the M3 leaving the saloons almost standing still. On past, zip between and away. ‘Poop-poop, poop-poop,’ translated into modernish as ‘zoom zoom, zoom zoom’. We’re the incarnate sound the rap car drivers try to conjure from their stereos: ‘boom boom, boom boom,’ while they wait in traffic snarls. We divide the airwaves, the bike and me. If we could go fast enough we’d hear the sound barrier crash open behind us. As it is we hardly dare hit a ton in case the fuzz is lurking somewhere behind a camera. Still it’s great hacking and yawing between the dawdling cars, the dinosaur container lorries, and their pot-bellied liquid carrier cousins. In no time there’s the junction six sliproad and I must sidle across the lanes and settle down to a respectable thirty. I pull in to a layby and study the map I downloaded from the Wessex website. Then I’m off again, weaving a leisurely route round the outskirts of the town that boasts on a hoarding that it’s home to the international pharmaceutical making pills for ills, and on the hit list I remember, of animal rights activists.

Down Wessex Road now towards the campus. Which came first, the name of the road or the uni? It was St Walburgha before, so someone must have taken inspiration from the location or nobbled the council to change the name. I cruise towards the first cluster of buildings and I’m stopped dead by a high gated iron fence. Fuck! No storming arrival then with a spectacular purring of the engine in low gear, and skirl of tyres to wake the dead. Drifting right up to the gate I cut the juice and prop the old girl up on her stand. I swing my leg over, take off my helmet and go up to the gate.

It’s the right place. A neat brass plate says so. There’s an entry phone and a numeric pad to open the side panel of the gate to let pedestrians in. But you have to know the code. That’s very clear. I stare at it, willing it to open, for someone to come through and hold it conveniently ajar for me. Beyond I can see grounds with grass, shrubs and winding gravel paths. Way back are buildings, some old brick, others new, glass, steel and what must be concrete under the pale recon stone cladding. I can just make out the octagonal chapel of St Walburgha almost hidden by dark azaleas, where Anglican nuns once taught aspirant scholarship girls to teach.

I go back to the bike and get out my mobile. Gilbert must give me the entry code.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m outside the fence like Love Locked Out.’

‘In my day the gate was always open.’

‘Well it isn’t now. And no one seems to be going in and out. No students I mean.’

‘They wouldn’t be.’

‘Why not?’

‘Term hasn’t begun. Not until next week.’

I feel a complete Wally. Why didn’t I check my facts, instead of zooming off into the sunrise?

‘Maybe I’ll just ring the bell and see what happens.’

‘There won’t be anyone there, except maintenance staff, porters and so on.’

I’ve just put myself at a disadvantage with Gilbert, given him the chance to feel superior. Somehow I have to reclaim the high ground.

‘Can’t you think of anyone who supported you, who might help? I need to get inside, to get the feel of things, when the place is back in business of course. I need to see someone, talk to them, sniff out the background. You’re going to want help. There must be someone who at least knows the entry code.’

‘You must realise they would be putting their own job at risk. These new security arrangements aren’t for general safety purposes, keeping out voyeurs or even would-be rapists. They are designed to keep me out and the students in. Their comings and goings will be monitored by closed-circuit video.’

‘Then we have to find someone now, before term begins, before they’re banged up inside.’

He’s gone. I peer through the bars again and think I see a blue-overalled figure moving about among the far trees with a wheelbarrow. Is Gilbert telling the truth or lying to me in spite of my warning? Did he know about the new security? Suddenly all the excitement that rode behind me on the way down like a following wind has gone out of the case and I’m stranded, gasping for air, with only an empty ride back ahead of me.

That Christmas was the first that I went to the great house but still in my guise of Amyntas, for my lady said that I was too known already in that form to pass now as another. She must have her ladies about her at Wilton which should include Mistress Griffiths who could not be sworn to secrecy. To tell truth I was glad of this for I had become so used to see myself as Amyntas as green summer turned to autumn and thence to foul winter, when all the ways were muddied to the axle and fever ran through our company at Ramsbury and the ladies took to their beds with streaming eyes and noses, and vomiting. The countess and I were kept busy with cordials and balms, boiling pimpernel in wine for healing draughts, hot and cold, and then mixing onion and honey mustard hot for unguents against sores and blains, and for purging the head. I felt a little jealousy stir in me to see how our lady tended them, holding their heads while they drew up the smell of the honey mustard to cleanse the rheum or sitting them up with an arm about their shoulders to drink down the vinum pimpernel.

For ourselves as a prophylactic, the countess and I drank every morning a draught of rosemary-flower wine. Whether that strengthened our bodies to resist the infection or drove it out once in I cannot say, only that we ourselves stayed free of rheum and fever. Then she commended me for this was a receipt of my father’s that I learned of him, and served him well for many years until that death that no man can escape.

In December came a week of sharp frosts. Suddenly all were well again and busy with preparations to remove to the great house. There was laughter and bustle and talk of who might come to Wilton. Mistress Griffiths was disappointed that the young earl would not come, being still in disgrace, but would keep the feast with his uncle Sidney, if her majesty would let my lady’s brother home to Penshurst from his employment in Flushing as governor there, or if not Earl William would pass the season with other friends, for the countess would not receive him, he showing no sign of remorse now that his lover had been delivered of a dead child, but was gone to London to attend at the Parliament and petition her majesty to let him travel abroad to wipe out his disgrace in her service.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the other young lord, Mr Philip, will come.’ But she would have none of that saying he was but a schoolboy still.

‘Many are married younger than seventeen,’ said the duenna, and she began to sing in a low cracked voice:

O daughter, o daughter I’ve done to you no wrong, I’ve married you to a bonny boy, his age it is but young, And a lady he will make you, that’s if you will be made Saying your bonny boy is young but a-growing.

So we took our journey from Ramsbury to Wilton, my lady in her coach with Mistress Griffiths and the duenna, and the other ladies following in their coach, and the rest of the household train behind them. I rode with the steward and other gentlemen through Marlborough where we stayed only for dinner at the Bear Inn and thence to Upavon, a pretty village by the river where we were received for the night at the manor house to lie there as the countess was accustomed to do to break her journey, though some of the household were obliged to lie at the Antelope, it being but a small house for such a company. Often my lady would rest there two or more nights but this time she was eager to be at Wilton. So we resumed our way early in the morning as soon as it was light which being December and St Lucy’s Day was late enough if we were to reach the great house before nightfall.

‘Dearest Wilton, where I first came as a bride, how soon shall we be sundered,’ the countess said as the great gateway and the lofty walls came towards us out of the down-setting sun that turned all the sky behind to a furnace of red and gold where the clouds were puffs of pink smoke as from a giant bellows. Beside its walls runs the river whose name of ‘Nadder’ signified in the British language ‘birds’, as my father told me, and to this day the waterfowl swim there in great numbers, in especial the painted mallards in blue and green livery with their dun wives and the silver swans who sing only at their dying.

When the gate was flung open we saw the whole household assembled in the courtyard to greet their lady, all bowing deep, with music playing and the children from the cathedral to sing one of her own psalms in greeting.

When long absent from lovely Zion By the lord’s conduct home we returned We our senses scarcely believing Thought mere visions moved our fancy.

Then in our merry mouths laughter abounded Tongues with gladness loudly resounded While thus wond’ring nations whispered, ‘God with them most royally dealeth.’

My lady took up her own chamber again where she used always to lie. The steward would have had me lie with one of the grooms of the late earl’s chamber but I said I was accustomed to lie near my lady to fetch and carry, and he let me put a pallet in an alcove of the passage that led from her anteroom, where Mistress Griffiths lay, to the great staircase. Then I saw that my sex might be the more hard of concealing among such a press of people for we were like a little town in ourselves or a country echo of the queen her court.

Every day more company resorted to us, as all the nobility and gentry of the county bringing rich presents and petitions for my lady’s word in high places, for the earl being but a minor, and besides out of favour, the world still made suit to the countess though but the dowager. There came too some of her people out of Wales from her castle of Cardiff and other her properties so that Mistress Griffiths spoke with many in her own tongue which seemed to me truly like the language of the adepts or necromancers.

She made great play to tease me with my ignorance of it, laughing and nodding towards me as the words poured from her to one of her kinswomen. ‘Ah,’ she said in English, ‘if you had been bred up by the old earl you would understand us for our language came easier to his tongue than the English.’ And indeed I have heard it said that the old earl writ English but poorly.

At her other houses as Ramsbury and Ivychurch the countess ate modestly but at the great house we dined and supped in state with many dishes of meat of birds, and beasts, as beef and mutton, coney pies, herons, larks baked, bitterns, plovers and teals with chickens, pheasant and partridge. Cheat and manchet, both coarse and fine wheaten bread we had with butter and eggs and sallets in season, for drink ale and beer and Rhenish wine, and for sweetness tarts, fritters, custards and doucets. The ladies’ skins glistened and plumped, and there was much laughter behind hands and whispering in dark passages when there was no dancing or the play to be had.

All this time the duenna became more kindly to me, telling me many things of my lady’s childhood, she having been with her since her birth when her mother was my lady’s wet nurse. ‘Which if I should lean upon it would give me the right to call her foster sister but I would not. Yet I am privy to many things known to none else.’ And here she looked at me straightly as if some of them might pertain to me so that I kept very still.

‘My mother brought me into her service when I was a girl and charged me to watch over her and keep her from harm. And this I do as best I may. I think there is no harm in you, child Boston, but as for the others I do not trust them. They use her to gain their own ends and not out of love. But any that harm her I will find ways to bring down. There is more than one power that may be called on and the angels, as the old ways say, have care for the innocent.’

From this I understood that she had been brought up a papist and might be one still but this she would keep from my lady, being with her brother, Sir Philip, and my Lord of Leicester their uncle among the foremost in the work of reformation, and the preservation of the Protestant faith, as her psalms do attest.

One thing in especial I was glad of in our stay at Wilton in that I might find occasion to visit our old home in Salisbury and that churchyard of St Edmund’s where my father is buried. And now I think as I sit here writing this memorial, that if they should hang me as a witch I shall not lie beside him, my mother and brother in consecrated ground but be flung into a limepit to dissolve without hope of resurrection when the dead shall rise in the flesh. And yet I am innocent of any malicious practice which, if this is not made manifest, then I shall doubt of God himself as the atheists do since he has no power to protect the innocent.

The first night of our coming to the great house we did not sup in state for my lady was tired from the journey, the ways being very foul and rutted so that she and her ladies were bruised from riding in the coaches which swayed and jolted extremely. The countess went at once to her bedchamber and said that she would receive only the chief steward until the next day. Then came in Mr Davys her steward to report, with gifts newly come from her brother Sir Robert in Flushing where there is much trade with the Indies. Among them, with some French wines, was a parcel of tobacco which she had requested from him, of the finest high Trinidad which my lady became accustomed to during the sickness of the late earl, her husband. ‘For nothing,’ she said, ‘would give him any ease but to take tobacco and I trying it found likewise and for the headache it is the only thing.’

She called at once for her pipe which Mistress Griffiths filled with a little of the leaf and laid a wax taper to it. My lady drew in the smoke very daintily and her face which before had been warped with fatigue softened at once. ‘Come Amyntas and try what it will do for you,’ she said. So I took my first breath of tobacco to the envy of her ladies who would try it for themselves but she would not let them suck on the pipe for she said their teeth were rotten and their tongues like goats. When I coughed a little from the smoke they laughed very much together and I saw that her speech which was sweet to me would do me harm with the other servants. The taste of it was of herbs blended together as rosemary and sorrel. It seemed to suffuse through my veins like a draught of spiced wine on a winter morning.

Mr Davys then handed my lady letters from several parts which she bade me open and read. Two were of little account but when I opened the third from Sir Philip her brother’s friend Sir Edward Wotton I found two sheets of paper folded small that seemed to have slipped between the pages by chance. First I read her the letter which was but a report of the queen’s health and the court’s progress towards London. There was no mention of the enclosures which raised my suspicion that they were not intended for the countess.

‘What more have you there?’ she asked. I unfolded the papers which were written in a different hand.

‘My lady some verses which I think have got in by chance.’

‘How so? What verses?’

‘They are inscribed “to my dear brother Edward”.’

‘Go on child.’

‘From his loving brother Henry. Some lines sent me in a letter by my friend the wit J. Donne, secretary to the Lord Keeper. Since he asked that no copies be made of them I send you the originals.’

‘This is done to raise his brother’s interest. Let us hear them.’

‘My lady, the first is titled “On his Mistress Going to Bed”.’

‘Young man’s bawdy. And the second?’

‘An heroical epistle. “Sappho to Philaenis.”’

‘Begin the first.’

So I read her:

Come madam come all rest my powers defy

Until I labour I in labour lie…

‘Enough,’ she said laughing, ‘it is as I supposed. Not to be read in company. Leave us.’ She waved her hand in dismissal to her ladies and Mr Davys and moved from the tapestried chair she had been sitting in to her daily couch, where she reclined in a smoky cloud like to some goddess on an altar wreathed with the haze of sacrifice.

‘The tobacco has made me easier. Go on. Begin the second. Let us see if that is meant for women’s ears and eyes.

‘Where is that holy fire that verse is said to have…’ I began not seeing as I read what lay in wait for me.

Plays some soft boy with thee, oh there wants yet

A mutual feeling that should sweeten it

His chin a thorny hairy unevenness

Doth threaten, and some daily change possess.

Thy body is a natural Paradise,

In whose self, unmanur’d, all pleasure lies

Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou then

Admit the tillage of a rough harsh man?

Men leave behind them that which their sin shows,

And are as thieves trac’d, which rob when it snows,

But of our dalliance no more signs there are,

Than fishes leave in streams or birds in air,

And between us all sweetness may be had;

All, all that Nature yields, or Art can add.

‘What is this Philaenis: man or woman?’

‘I do not know my lady. The name suggests a man Philo, the teacher of Cicero.’

‘Read on and let us see. There were the brothers, the Philaeni who were buried alive to save their country.’

My eye had travelled down the page while she was speaking. I did not know how to continue but did not dare refuse.

‘Must I read it myself?’ she said, suddenly assuming the mistress who must be obeyed.

My two lips, eyes, thighs differ from thy two,

But so as thine from one another do;

And oh no more; the likeness being such,

Why should they not alike in all parts touch?

Hand to strange hand, lip to lip none denies;

Why should they breast to breast or thighs to thighs?

Likeness begets such strange self flattery,

That touching myself, all seems done to thee.

I faltered, feeling a throb begin in my loins and pass up through my stomach and thighs in a hot wave that I attributed to the tobacco I had smoked that now I thought reached down to those parts and caused this fever as if a hot poultice had been laid to them.

‘This is a woman to a woman. Give me the paper. It is something near some words of my brother’s. Fetch me my Arcadia.’

I went to the bag which contained the most precious things she carried always with her, that held her jewels and gloves, and those two books, the other being of the psalms, which she was never parted from.

‘It is in Book Two where he wrote of the love of Philoclea for Zelmane believing her to be an Amazon and not knowing yet it was the Prince Pyrocles in disguise,’ the countess said turning the pages. ‘Here it is. “First she would wish that they two might live all their lives together like two of Diana’s nymphs…Then grown bolder she would wish either herself or Zelmane a man.”‘ She read on silently for a little and then continued aloud.’ “It is the impossibility that doth torment me: for unlawful desires are punished after the effect of enjoying but unpossible desires are punished in the desire itself…thou lovest me excellent Zelmane and I love thee. And if she can love poor me shall I think scorn to love such a woman as Zelmane.”’

I’m reading slowly so as not to miss anything. What was Gilbert up to with this text? It seems harmless enough so far but then I’m not reading it as the Wessex people might. When I got back from my abortive trip today I rang the Gaos to see if they needed me and was glad to find they could manage with just Charlie, a young cousin from Hong Kong, studying English. He’s probably a would-be illegal and one day I may find myself defending him in some immigration tribunal but at the moment he’s safely enrolled in some language school or college. The Gaos have bought him a crap second-hand scooter he can’t go too fast on, and that isn’t worth stealing. I think he sleeps on a camp bed in the front part of the shop that becomes a hot house of green pads like bladderwrack, under the flashy canopy of my namesake the jade plant and the rubber plants that thrive to fifteen feet in the steam of a Chinese kitchen. Two of them arch from pots inside the doorway making it like the entrance to some temple hung with scarlet fringed lanterns. It must be good for my stomach to have an occasional night off Mary’s tofu and egg fried rice. I munch on crisp cos lettuce and Fribourg Camembert I picked up from the stall in the Waterloo Road on my way home as the commuters scurried like a disturbed antheap into the open maw of the station.

Amyntas’ memorial hypnotises me. I’m the rabbit caught in headlights or stunned by the snake’s stare as I watch her falling for her countess and remember my own plunge into passion, the crazy roller coaster of it, a ride on the out-of-control merry-go-round at the end of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. To take liberties with the bard: my mistress’ eyes were nothing like the sun, coral was far more red than her lips’ red. If snow is white why then her breasts were dun; if hairs are wires, gold wires grew on her head. I’m slipping into hindsight. At the time of course nothing was more shining than those gold wires.

How naff to fall in love at the office party even if it was on a boat, a shipboard romance of three hours up the river to Greenwich with its baroque enticements in stone a fine backdrop for corporate lust. My first outing with the comrades of Settle and Fixit. Somehow I hadn’t expected legal minds and loins to be as susceptible to booze and bonking as any works outing or accounts department communal thrash. And I expected nothing on board to be to my special taste. So when she beckoned me over and patted the padded bench beside her I went unsuspecting, careful not to let the boat’s movement make too rough seas in my glass of wine.

‘You look a bit out of things over there. As if you don’t know too many of these renegades.’

‘I’ve only been in the firm a couple of months.’ I heard myself sounding almost tremulous. Pity poor me. Not my usual style at all.

‘Helen Chalmers,’ she said putting out a hand tipped with iridescent green fingernails. Her name was on the list of partners just before a James Chalmers.

‘Jade Green.’

‘Your parents must have had a sense of humour.’

‘My mother believed no one could forget it or shorten it.’

“You could be Jay or even J.G. She could be wrong. Mothers often are. My daughter tells me I’m wrong most of the time. I wonder where the wine’s got to? I don’t feel like tottering up that gangway for a refill.’

‘I’ll get us both one.’ I stood up.

She held out her glass and looked up at me, smiling. ‘Don’t forget to come back.’

That was when I fell overboard and went down for the first time. My heart began to thud and I seemed to be holding my breath without knowing it. No wonder we invented the image of Cupid’s arrow, plugging in tipped with adrenaline. The buzzing in my ears was like a flight of feathers. I hauled myself up to the next deck, the mess deck it soon would be if it wasn’t already, cupped my fingers round the neck of a bottle of claret and hurried back.

‘Someone tried to steal your seat but I shooed them away. Great that you brought the bottle.’

Later when we first made love I asked you how you knew.

‘Hadn’t I been looking for you all my life?’

It was a tease, a lying tease but it was true too. Many women turn over in their minds what it would be like to try it, just once, with another woman. Not seriously perhaps. Just for a laugh maybe and then back to the real thing. That’s what the researchers say anyway. All those articles in mags like Cosmo that no doubt once seemed so daring are run-of-the-mill soft porn now, offered on the internet every time you open your email or in the personal columns of respectable newspapers: ‘Women seeking women.’

The noise was growing all round us as the booze took hold but we were in our own pocket of stillness, at least I was. You never told me. ‘How was it for you?’ But there aren’t any words; not reliable words in spite of all the poets have written trying to pin down that moment, to catch the butterfly in their net without breaking its wings.

The boat was turning at the smooth concrete sickles of the flood barrier. We were riding into the west into a dazzling sun that threw up sparkles from the water and drenched us in the luminous haze of a Turner. The river pushed against us as we turned, swaying little ship of fools that had become for me a voyage to Cythera, Venus’ island of loves. We were swayed against each other by our rocking horse as it rode the wake of another passing pleasure boat. You were trying to stand up, bracing yourself against the varnished ribs of the hull. I stood up too.

‘I suppose I should go and find Jim.’ The smile was almost apologetic. You looked directly at me still smiling. I held on to your look with my own eyes. ‘Let’s have lunch. I like to get to know new members. Where can I find you?’

‘I’m in Drew’s office.’

‘Drew?’

‘Drewpad Singh.’

‘I’ve no memory for anyone’s name. You’re Jay. I can just about hang on to that.’

I don’t know how I got home. In those days home was a studio flat in Earl’s Court among the last wave of nostalgic Aussies, and the new wave of Arabs who come over for treatment in the Cromwell Hospital. I walked a bit along the Embankment after we docked and then the wine hit me. I was looking for Embankment Station. The rest is a blank. The next morning when I woke I tried to put it all back together in sequence but it seemed something I’d dreamt, unreal. My clothes were hung over a chair. There was a half empty glass of red wine on the draining board in my slip of a kitchen. Had any of it happened? What had happened? I was rough with myself. Don’t expect her to call. That was it. Just chatting up one of the juniors. Being kind. It meant nothing. If you bumped into her in the corridor she’d be embarrassed if she remembered at all.

I was ripe for disaster after an unhappy attempt to conform with a guy in Humanities at Sussex, a switch to law and aching after Zena who thought we were just mates, protecting each other from the sweaty socks and stewy underpants, when they wore them at all, of those colleagues we didn’t fancy, whose youthful necks were still aflame with fiery volcanic zits. At weekends I’d drift up to the Phoenix in Cavendish Square, rave the night away, sometimes ending up in a strange bed, learning new tricks, a rite of passage I felt entitled to. Chastity wasn’t an option as we neared the gay nineties. But heart and cunt stayed resolutely apart and one Saturday night the serpent scales came off my eyes and I saw the club scene for the frenetic search it was that could only end in tears after bedtime. When I moved to Settle and Fixit I’d been back just twice in seven years since I left Sussex and found myself a job and the studio flat. Grew up. Except that you never do, not inside. Zena had finally lost it to an ex-public schoolboy who already had his place booked as PPA to a rising Tory politician. He was too clever a lawyer to make the mistake of date rape but then he didn’t need to. By then she was tired of saying no and at least he bathed and washed his thin pale hair.

Instead of clubbing I took to going home at the weekends, hanging out with the parents, the black labrador, the ginger cat and my brother’s family, the other members of our extending clan if they happened to be visiting. I knew Mam was worried about me, that she and Dad lay in bed in the morning talking around what I was or wasn’t doing. I said I was studying for my Bar exams, which was true, and that didn’t leave much time or energy for anything else.

In true English style nothing was said of course. But there was no mention of Mr Right coming along either. Only once Roger my brother looked at me straight and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be getting married.’

I looked straight back at him. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘So I’ll have to provide the grandchildren.’ Two years later he did, marrying Jenny, a schoolfriend’s sister who got conveniently pregnant on their Barcelona honeymoon. It left me free and gave my parents a new topic of concern. I began to think about moving up and into chambers, becoming a real lawyer instead of just a legal adviser to a small firm, drawing up contracts and leases, and keeping them the right side of company law.

‘So you’ll be able to get us out of trouble,’ Dad said when I told them I’d been called to the Bar.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘I fancy one of those anti-capitalism demos myself. What about you, Linda?’ I knew he was only half joking. After taking early retirement when British Rail was privatised Dad was helping out at the local union branch office.

‘I might have a go at that Leylandii hedge they’ve planted next door if it grows any higher.’

They were proud of having put me and Roger through university and we were both careful not to let a distance come between us as we moved away from Acton, further into London, Roger to the trendy Notting Hill semi his accountancy fees could afford, and me to the anonymity of Earl’s Court.

Why am I dredging all this stuff up? Because, I suppose, it’s been lying there at the bottom of the pit that’s my stomach, a lumpy mess of potage, part birthright, part the indigestible experience I’ve swallowed whole over my thirty-odd years. Maybe it’s time to spew it all up and start again if you ever can. Marlowe was a dedicated melancholic for all his wisecracks so perhaps he isn’t the best role model for me after all. I’ve got to put all this aside and get back to Adrian Gilbert: I have to get into Wessex. Why don’t I just pick up the phone tomorrow morning, get the number off their website, and see what happens. I pour myself another glass of wine. Decision time.

I dream I’m in somewhere cold and dark, lying on straw. I know my clothes are filthy and my hair matted. Then I’m talking to someone I can’t see. ‘I can help you,’ I say. ‘I can defend you.’ There’s a shrill buzzing noise. It’s the alarm going off. My heart is thudding somewhere up in my throat and I’m slippery with the acid sweat of nightmare or the killer night fevers of consumption and Aids.

As I butter my toast and drink my coffee I bone up on tribunal procedure which isn’t something I’ve had to do before, and rehearse what I’m going to say when I get through to Wessex. Then I think I’ll try to see if the Temple of the Latent Christ has its own website. I log on and search via the ridiculously named Google. Bingo.

They have indeed and it tells me there are branches of the Temple in Switzerland, Peru, Swaziland and the UK. It even invites punters to sign on for courses at Wessex. The fees seem astronomical but maybe things have changed since I left Sussex and these aren’t as bad as I think. Now I can listen, and watch, an address by a bishop. The site also offers me almost instant ordination if I will subscribe to their beliefs, become a member of their church, as I suppose I have to call it. ‘Unlike other sites offering immediate ordination we offer only to the committed who have subscribed to the tenets of our faith. You may choose to be a lay member or one of the chosen, the elect who may perform certain ceremonies as prescribed by the council of bishops and elders under the guidance of our Father in Christ, Apostle Joachim after a period of probation.’

I wait for the address. First comes some unidentified but unmistakably numinous music, tonal religious candy floss. Then the bishop, or should I say the Apostle, against a desert background like that in pictures of St Jerome in the wilderness, except that there’re no friendly lion and lamb lying down together. The Temple of the Latent Christ it seems is every one of us. So far not too far from certain wings of traditional Christian theology. But it’s also all the committed wherever they may be. Shots of smiling faces and uplifted hands, brown and pink and black. We are all bound together once we have dedicated ourselves. No going back.

Most religions have an opt out clause, except I’ve read somewhere, the Parsees’ Zoroastrians where you can’t get in and you can’t get out. I’ve frozen the frame on ‘His Charisma’. Now we go on. The Temple rejects the later Christian accretions of the Synoptic Gospels and bases its teachings on the scriptures of the Dead Sea Scrolls and those writings, the Apostle would not call them apocrypha, rejected by those who have perverted the true faith, together with Revelation. I begin to smell Gnosticism, usually somewhere at the heart of DIY Christian sects, the new evangelicals of our corporatist culture.

Joachim is clean-shaven and smiling gravely. He gestures with shapely hands; expanding and contracting his meaning, pushing out into the world leaving his vulnerable heart unguarded and then drawing his audience back into it. He isn’t a passionate orator like Paisley or Martin Luther King. This is new style, low key, almost murmured. Nevertheless I can see that it could be hypnotic. In case we miss anything, bullet points are texted across the wilderness behind his head, in a verbal nimbus. Christ is latent in all of us individually, only asking to be found. He is to be ‘accessed’, he smiles a little at the term, ‘by identification with the suffering servant, by giving yourself up to sacrifice. There are places, temples where the committed and the elect have all things in common and live in chastity until the coming of the kingdom. These places are temples because of those who live there, not because of brick or concrete.

‘Now through the internet anyone can join in, in spirit. Virtual reality is God’s gift of the latter day. Anyone, anywhere in the world, who wishes can enter into the new kingdom of God, the new covenant, by becoming a member of the Temple which will ensure them the password, the key to the kingdom.

‘And there’s no time to lose. Apocalypse, in the shape of global warming and finally a meteorite strike that sends the remnants of earth spinning into the sun’s gravity field for our last baptism of fire, can happen at any moment. What after all is time? As the old hymn had it: “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone.”

‘Unlike the creationists who interpret those parts of the received scriptures literally, and refuse the promised revelations, the Temple with the knowledge given us by modern science, under God’s eye knows this now to be literally true. I don’t say it will come tomorrow, only that it will come, that we are living in the latter days of John’s Revelation and then the children of darkness shall perish and only the children of light be saved to enter another, some scientists claim, the eleventh, dimension, the heavenly kingdom of a more radiant universe, where we shall find the promised mansions.’

I hear him winding up for the crunch. ‘The scrolls from the Dead Sea give us the rule of the covenant by which we should live. There are those who live in the world following the rule as best they can but susceptible to many temptations. Then there are those, the elect as they are called, who live together in a community. It was out of such a community in the desert that John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth came. But the time wasn’t right. The children of darkness overcame the children of light through God’s will, for nothing happens without his will. Now the time has come again for those who will listen and act. It is your choice: obliteration or eternal life beyond this finite universe. To know more, to take the first step towards salvation fill in the form that will appear on the screen and email it to: temple@latentchrist.org.’

Wait. The mesmeric voice has got to me. I’m almost about to click on to the first box that comes up asking me if I want to continue. If I do I’ll be traceable. Maybe I am already. I click on the close window and exit, pursued by what? A tracking system, a virus that will eat up all my data, the following click of a mouse more potent than the bear that ate up Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale? Let me out.

Is Wessex a temple as Joachim defined it? And what does the bit about identifying with the suffering servant and preparing for sacrifice mean? Then there’s the idea of having all things in common like the early Christians. The Temple seems to be harking back to the Essenes, though Joachim didn’t use that word, the desert sect that was said to be the origin of John the Baptist preaching his doom message in the wilderness. But Jesus didn’t go for all that rule stuff. They hated him for breaking the rules, drinking wine, allowing his disciples to pick ears of corn on the Sabbath and eat the grains when they were hungry. Let’s look up Essenes in the on-line encyclopedia. See if anything fits.

‘Sect (Second century BC to First century AD) which together with the Sadducees and Pharisees made up late Jewish political and religious life before the Diaspora. Rejected temple sacrifice. Referred to in Dead Sea Scrolls. Practised an early communism and strict adherence to their religious rule, including celibacy for the elect. Massacred by the Romans. Their centre at Qumran deserted in AD 68 after the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem.

Well, there’s the property in common. A beautiful concept but very dangerous in the wrong hands. Who keeps the purse strings? Joachim and his cronies? Is the principal of Wessex one of the elect? Or is it a perfectly ordinary college being used as a cover? Did they plan to get rid of Gilbert because he wouldn’t join their club?

Strange that he doesn’t seem too worried by all this, except insofar as it’s lost him his job. Maybe I’m making too much of the Temple lot. Maybe they just see Wessex as a way of getting a bit of money out of overseas students. Where’s their centre, their home base then? Here in this country or somewhere else? The States, Switzerland, Africa? Or perhaps you don’t need a centre. If you have the internet your organisation can be as amorphous as the universe itself. The terrorists who hole up in caves or on mountain tops in real locations have got it all wrong. They should be fluid. They’re still too physical. Real horror will be virtual, in a cloud of unknowing. As fantastical as a James Bond movie or a Playstation game. The Great Dictator will flood all our screens with images of violence and horror, brainwashing us until we give in. Orwell saw it all over half a century ago. How we could be duped by a semblance of reality, by shots in a war that may not exist at all. Mam and Dad have told me about the Cold War and what that did to their young lives and maybe it was just another con.

What a strange blend of pseudo science and history whoever started it has dreamt up with the Temple of the Latent Christ. And do they believe it themselves, or is it just a money-spinning scam? I want to know more but I’m scared of being identified if I simply pretend to join, though I can see I might have to if I can’t get at them any other way. What must your needs be to make you want to sign up to such a group?

I can understand about young men who feel themselves outside the society they were born into on some grotty estate in the Midlands, looking for dignity and conviction in belief and action, seeing the white male ceiling above them they can never climb through, much as it’s been for women. And still is. That’s partly why I’m sitting here with Lost Causes on my nameplate. To get anywhere those boys have to start from some sort of middle class, even if that may be just up from the corner shop, if they aspire to accountancy, law, business management.

Like my sometime boss Drewpad Singh who steered me through my first weeks at Settle and Fixit. I should have got to know him better, asked him more but I was too obsessed with Helen once the lightning struck. And if you’re unemployed because the mills and sweatshops your parents came to this cold country to work in have closed, the rackety machines are all stitching away busily in some corner of an old empire, the bright clothes tumbling to the ground at half the UK minimum wage in Indonesia, Morocco, Quanjiao, then what do you do? How do you make yourself a place in this world where we can all see how the other half lives? Maybe Mr Goa’s nephew will end up joining the Triad boys on their bikes running the protection racket in the takeaway trade. Or do his law degree and find himself defending them. Maybe I should offer him a job, except that I can’t even make enough to keep myself.

I had awaited the return of Dr Adrian Gilbert, who had been on a visit to his friends and estate in Devon, on our arrival at the Great House with some flutterings of fear because of my father’s talk of his choleric temper and my lady’s own apprehension that he would not be pleased at finding a new young physician at her side. And so it proved.

The second day of our stay at Wilton she took me to view her laboratory there which was in size and variety of vessels and means for performing all kinds of experiments so far superior to our little room at Ramsbury, as I now saw it, where before I had thought it spacious and equipped with everything needful for our work. There were many delicate glass retorts and cups as well as of clay, and polished lenses for magnification. There were lodestones and a set of sailors’ needles pointing north. One wall was of cupboards whereof each drawer was neatly labelled with the name of the herb or mineral within. There were two furnaces, great and small, scales for weighing greater quantities and a fine balance for the littlest. There were also glass boxes with curiosities inside them as snake skins, a monkey’s skull, a dried bat pinned to a board and many fine big crystals that glinted rose pink, opal, sapphire and emerald in the light from the long windows.

‘That quadrant was given to the late earl by Sir Walter Raleigh on his return from his voyage of discovery to the Caribees,’ my lady said pointing to a fine instrument lying beside a pair of globes. ‘Should you like to make experiments here?’

I picked up the box with the monkey’s skull.

‘If my lady will allow me. How like this is to a man’s skull in little.’

At that the door was thrust violently open and an old stout man strode in. At once he came up to me and seized the glass box from my hand. He turned and bowed to the countess.

‘Forgive me madam but this clumsy boy might have let it drop.’

‘This is my new page Amyntas Boston, Dr Gilbert, who helps me with my work at Ramsbury.’

‘Where are you from boy?’

‘From Salisbury sir.’

‘I knew a Boston in Salisbury, he that was sometime mayor of St Edmunds and thought himself a great laborant in the chemical arts.’

‘He was my father sir.’

‘Many times I have bid him come to my service,’ the countess said, ‘and he would not but now I have his child.’

‘He was a puffer madam and not worthy of your service, a mere mechanical.’

‘My father was not a mere puffer sir as you are pleased to say but a physician and philosopher.’ Something more of what my father had told me concerning this Gilbert had returned to me, that he had dabbled in necromancy with Dr John Dee and been the instrument of his own brother, Sir Humphrey his death on his return voyage from Atlantis which was as my father told me two years before my birth. And had my father been with them, as well he might have as physician to the fleet, I had never entered this world.

‘I say again madam this insolent boy’s father was a mere mechanical and he is unfit for your service. I will try him with some questions and then you shall see.’

‘Will you be tried Amyntas?’ my lady asked, seating herself in the chair from which she was used to oversee the work.

‘I will do my best to answer to anything madam, as long as you do not take my answers for mere impertinence.’

‘Have at you both then,’ she said and let fall her fine lawn handkerchief as at a joust, a sign that we should begin.

‘Under what sign should Amara dulcis be gathered and against what diseases is it sovereign?’

‘There are those who say that it is a mercurial plant and should therefore be gathered under that sign on Tuesday in the month of July, and that it is a remedy against witchcraft if hung about the neck. But the true use of woody nightshade, as it is known to the country people in these parts, is as an infusion in white wine to open obstructions of the liver and spleen and therefore against yellow or black jaundice and the dropsy.’

‘Do you not believe then that diseases vary by the operation of the stars and are to be cured by herbs whose planet is contrary to that of the disease or in some cases in sympathy with it, as the herbs of Venus cure diseases of the loins and generation?’

‘Sir my father taught me that the efficacy of which herbs are sovereign against which diseases is a matter of experience and experiment.’

‘So that if my lady, the countess, were sick you would not seek out the cause but only apply some remedy of your own approving?’

‘I would seek out the cause in nature and the body sir, not in the stars.’

‘Then you have no guiding principle but would make the body of your lady a laboratory for experiment, trying first this remedy, then that? You reject the wisdom of the great Paracelsus or perhaps you do not know it in your rustic learning.’

‘My father and I often read together in Paracelsus, his writing. But there was much that my father did not accept.’

‘As…?’

‘As that doctrine that sees man as the microcosmos of the whole world, and his tria prima. But of his saying that some minerals may be efficacious as remedies or of the value of experiment then my father held that these might be followed but always with extreme care.’

‘And for the cure of witchcraft?’

‘My father believed that witchcraft lies in the minds of those that hold themselves bewitched as a delusion or fancy, and so too in the minds of those that deem themselves to have power as witches.’

‘Do you not believe in the power of Satan?’

‘My father said that such questions were the domain of priests not physicians.’

And angels and demons that they may be conjured up and converse with men?’

My father had indeed told me of this conjuring by means of a crystal ball or polished mirror in which some men called skryers professed to descry such visions which for reward they would describe to others who saw nothing of themselves, and that the famous Dr Dee was so cozened for many years by divers rogues until men thought he was mad or a necromancer, who was in truth merely deceived.

‘I do not see sir why angels and demons who may have the freedom of the heavens should allow themselves to be confined in a glass or sphere for the benefit of one person.’

‘Do you not believe in good and evil?’

‘I believe in good men and evil men.’

‘Are you then an atheist Master Boston?’

‘My lady knows otherwise for I join her in the reading of her psalms and in her daily prayers in chapel, in private or in public devotion.’

‘But it may be that at such times your thoughts stray elsewhere.’

‘As all men’s do at times but that is not a hanging matter or who should escape the gallows.’

‘Then perhaps you are a papist in disguise.’

‘My allegiance is to the queen’s majesty and the church she is head of.’

‘And God and his son.’

‘He is the creator of heaven and earth and his son our teacher of the way we should follow.’

‘Is this what your father taught you?’

‘These are my own thoughts sir from reading in the scriptures.’

‘And does it not speak there of angels and devils and of the witch of Endor?’

‘Indeed. But many things in the scriptures are to be understood not word for word but as an image or symbol as Our Lord used his parables for instruction.’

‘And divination, the foretelling of future matters? Our fate in the stars?’

‘Our fate may indeed be there sir but it is not to be found out by divination for then we might seek to change it and no man can change the courses of the stars.’

‘Then you are a traitor to her majesty for did she not ask Dr Dee to cast her horoscope and that of the Queen of Scots when first she came to the throne and he foretold the fate of them both exactly as it came about. Was her majesty then deceived?’

‘Her majesty in her wisdom left nothing undone that might be judged by some to be efficacious. But had Dr Dee foreseen the opposite fates for her majesty and the Queen of Scots would he have dared to name them? Therefore I think he spoke as a courtier not as one who can see truly into the future.’

And your father, the puffer, did he not foretell the future and seek the tincture of immortality and of transformation in the soot and smoke of the furnace? Did you blow the bellows for him boy?’

Here I had to pause before I could answer for it was indeed true that my father sought the philosopher’s stone and the tincture of immortality but not for riches or that he and I might live for ever, flouting God’s commandment that all things and men must die, but to understand better the nature of creation, for he saw transmutation as a natural effect not of alchemy or magic. And although he rejected Paracelsus, his idea of the microcosmos that man is a world in little but saw him as closer to the beasts, of the same blood and breath and appetites with them, yet he laboured to find cures for body and mind wherever he could, that sickness might be transmuted into health.

‘I did not,’ I was able to answer truthfully, ‘for my father thought me too tender for any such work even if he undertook it himself, which I never saw, although certainly he used fire to make the white star of antimony which is a sovereign cure for many ills if taken with care and according to instruction.’

‘Come Dr Gilbert,’ the countess said then, ‘you have run through your whole armoury of shots and Amyntas has suffered them all and turned them back.’

‘I have others madam he shall not find so easy.’

‘Then you must try them another day. The game no longer amuses me.’

Gilbert bowed and left us.

‘Did your father not seek after those things Amyntas? Tell me truly,’ she asked when he had gone.

‘He did madam but not in my presence and not for gain but for knowledge. He laboured ceaselessly and it brought him early to his death as I see it but he never allowed me to observe him at that work.’

‘A pity. We might have continued with it. I should like to be first to find that which so many have lusted after. Did your father believe with Copernicus that the earth and the planets circle the sun?’

‘He did madam. He said that it was only pride that had led us into that error that the sun revolved about the earth and made man the centre of all things, and that Copernicus his theory was not contrary to scripture, for the Bible says only that God created the sun, stars and moon and set them in the sky as lights to divide day from night, and to govern the length of days and years and the seasons, but nothing of which should circle the other. And that all is to be understood as in a picture which shows on a small flat plane that which in life has depth and magnitude so that a whole landscape of trees and meadows may fit into a work by Hilliard or Oliver less than the size of a child’s palm.’

‘Some say that the matter cannot be resolved, for the same calculations in astronomy are agreeable to both theories and satisfy the same phenomena. Therefore it is wise to accept both indifferently until the philosophers agree with each other or some astronomer finds a way to settle the question. Now how shall we amuse ourselves in these twelve days of Christmas? Shall we make an actor of you Master Boston?’

‘I cannot say madam.’

‘Bring me the new little book of pieces, Mr Davison’s Poetical Rapsodie my son has sent, hoping to soften my heart. It is beside my bed. And call my ladies.’

I went on my errand through the long dark passages of the house and up the stairs, taking a lantern with me whose flame leapt and flickered in the draught, for the short day had closed on us already.

‘Your mistress bids you attend her in the great hall.’ They had been gossiping of lovers past, present or to come, I thought, for their chatter had stilled as soon as I entered the room. Some were playing cards while one picked out a new song by Dowland brought over from Flushing by my lady’s brother Sir Robert. The lutenist was a papist forced to seek employment overseas in Denmark since the queen would not let him come home although she kept the papist Byrd as her organist in the Chapel Royal.

‘I saw my lady weep,’ the girl sang.

The duenna clapped her hands. ‘You will all weep, if you do not put by your cards and attend her at once.’

Going through into the bedchamber I picked up the book. Her bed was still tousled as if she had just risen from it and I put my hand between the sheets almost expecting them to be warm. I thought I could smell the now familiar fragrance of her perfume. Picking up her nightshift of fine white linen embroidered with black silk and with panels of delicate lace as also at the neck and wrists, I held it to my cheek and drew in her scent. Then I was forced to hurry behind the ladies as they clattered down the stairs.

In the great hall the sconces had all been lit, the fire burned bright and the countess had caused a little dais to be brought in with a Turkey carpet over it on which she sat in a great chair as if enthroned. I thought no queen could have looked more regal and that truly this was a court in little so that I bowed as I presented her the book.

‘This is the dialogue of Astrea I wrote for the visit of the queen’s majesty that was suddenly cancelled. But she need not be present for it to be played in her honour and the country invited to see it. You Amyntas shall play Piers. Now I need someone for Thenot who be old.’

‘Not I my lady,’ said the duenna. ‘I am too old to keep words in my head. And besides it is not womanly. I could not dress myself in breeches at my age.’

‘Then we shall have to try you Mistress Griffiths how you shall look in a grey beard. You may hide your legs under a long gown like an alderman or beneath a shepherd’s smock.’

‘I do not care about the legs madam but the grey beard I hate.’

‘Then Secretary Samford must do it. He will need no addition to his grey hairs. One of you fetch him.’

‘He has been confined to his chamber with a rheum madam ever since we arrived here.’

‘See if he is well enough to attend us.’ When he came, for of course he darst not refuse, she said, ‘We shall have an entertainment for twelfth night that shall be my dialogue of “Astrea” made for the queen’s majesty.’

‘Why did her majesty not come madam when all was prepared for her?’ I asked.

‘It was a bad year, rain fell all through August, and her advisers thought it might injure her health. They said of course that it would be injurious to her people to wait on her in such weather which they knew was the argument she would best heed.’

‘Madam I have never acted before,’ Secretary Samford said.

I myself had never yet even seen a play except for the Salisbury street mummers at festival time enacting some old story of Robin Hood.

‘You remember Mr Samford,’ the countess went on, ‘that in my husband the late earl’s time we had our own troupe of players when four years after the coming of the Spanish ships the plague closed the London theatres and sent them out on the road where they were forced to sell their very play books and attire. Yet my lord had them to play in Shrewsbury and Ludlow and other places of his patronage. My brother Sidney writes that the lords are every day at plays in London when they are not at court, and even there the players come to perform after at the queen’s bidding. Now take the book between you and read the verses to us.’

So we began with our theatricals and although we stumbled at first because the words were new to us, the countess was pleased to say that we should do very well with practice and that we should quickly get our lines by heart.

‘We shall need rustic music to bring you in,’ she said, ‘and after it is over there shall be country dances. Then there must be shepherds’ weeds for the actors, and for my ladies they shall be dressed as shepherdesses and dance a hey. That should make us some sport.’

That night as I lay on my pallet outside my lady’s door I thought that the actor’s life was strange personating others, for I felt a confusion in my own mind that Amyntas-Amaryllis must now be Piers. Yet when I thought on the words that I must say which the countess had written, it was not Astrea I praised not even the great queen she personified but my own queen.

Naught like to her the earth enfolds.

And as I lay there I saw in the half-light from a lantern far off, a shape glide into the passage and towards her door. It stayed beside me and I could hear its breathing in the gloom and smell the pomander that hung on its belt. I judged it to be a man for there was no rustle as from lady’s skirts. I let my hand creep towards the little dagger I had bound about my leg under my nightshirt, for I distrusted the great house since we had come there and the many unknown persons about me. Feigning sleep I was yet ready to leap up and defend myself. The shape stood a minute or two beside me as if deliberating and truly a quick thrust of a rapier and I would have been dead. Whether that was in his mind I have never known but at last while I breathed heavily as deep in slumber he turned silently away, leaving me sick with fear either for my life or for my sex.

For I had begun at last to see those changes in my body that might unmask me and show me up as an imposture. When I had held my lady’s nightshift against my face and smelled her perfume, as when I put my hand between her sheets, I was aware of my heart keep intemperate time and a sweet tingling in my secrets, then a little gush between my thighs. After when I examined myself I was still moist as with a thick milky dew that I was afraid might appear as a stain on my slops if I should be seated so I took care to remain standing. I determined to wear some rag of linen always about my loins.

Also I felt a little ache and swelling in my breasts though not such as would appear beneath my doublet and shirt but only if I should be surprised naked without my nightshirt which I made sure never to be. Nevertheless I determined to bind my breasts for greater safety. I did not yet wish to lose my life as Amyntas for Amaryllis, to be confined by skirts and forced to consider marriage but would serve my lady as long as I could.

And while I lay there on my pallet I felt for the first time a fear of what would become of me, how I should make my living. Cast out by my countess I could only practise as a wise woman or a midwife and I had no mind to marry, to become subject to a husband and bear children. Perhaps I could continue in disguise in some place where no man knew me but that was to lose sight of my lady and daily intercourse with her. Suddenly my life which seemed so sweet and easy had been darkened by that shadow standing over me and all seemed at risk that before had been secure.

‘Secrets’: what a sweet word for it. Or them. Like bees thrusting into the trumpet bodies of newly opened flowers. And not like cunt that rhymes with grunt, hunt, runt, stunt and National Front. All hard rude masculine monosyllables. The female organ as devourer, a mouth with teeth that would chop a prick down to size. Not petalled softness. Just an excuse for violence and rape. A word to be shouted back in defiance or orgasm, that can be used for men as well as women. ‘You fucking cunt!’ I suppose the American equivalent is motherfucker. The ultimate insult. Coney, cunni was gentler. And pussy. Each with a slightly different feel to it.

My delight is a coney in the night

When she turns up her furry tail.

A fun bunny. Whereas pussy is more dangerous, with claws, naughty and a bit spiteful. Twat is just contemptuous, taken over by schoolboys and shouted on the bus going home.

After the boat docked at Westminster I walked back along the Embankment elated with booze and lust, not wanting to go tamely home to my studio flat. The city was afloat on the river, the floodlit Shell building, Somerset House and on the opposite bank, the County and Royal Festival Halls were moored ships that seemed to rise and fall with the dark waters as they leaned over their own reflections. Other drunks came towards me out of the night but I was too exultant and pissed to care. I was fireproof, more alive than for years. Would she seek me out? Would I ever hear from Helen Chalmers, my charmer, again?

The bridges were slung across the Thames on ropes of stars. I turned up Beaufort Street, crossed over King’s Road where London was still swinging its Friday night away. Then memory goes blank. I must have gone on up Dovehouse Street over Fulham Road and up into Earl’s Court, got out my keys, unlocked the house door and climbed up to my first-floor flat but in the morning I remembered nothing after I left the river and my vision of the floating city.

My clothes were hung up neatly. There was an untouched glass of water by the bed.

Saturday morning. Nothing could happen for two days. How to pass this time? I could call up Joel and we’d go to Heaven. I felt like dancing. I was still high.

‘You wouldn’t like it,’ he said when I told him my great idea.

‘Why not? I haven’t had a dance since for ever.’

‘That’s the point. We’re too old. It’s strictly for kids now.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I thought the same as you. You know: haven’t been for a long time. Check it out. It took me half an hour queuing to get in. I thought the bouncers on the door gave me a funny look. I left after another half hour. It was embarrassing. Nobody over twenty. Thirty you might as well be on crutches.’

‘Where do all the thirty-year-olds go then?’

‘Serial partnerships. “Going steady” it used to be called. They stay home or visit each other’s pads and cook what they’ve seen on the tele. There were some really dishy young guys there though and everyone was on something: pot, pills, speed. Who knows? You have to be to rave on like that all night.’

‘Where can we go then?’

‘The pub and a pizza, and then the pub.’

It was our usual routine. Only I’d fancied something different.

Joel is one of the most stable things in my life. We met when he was being cautious over boy-shags-boy encounters at the height of the Aids scare, when people had just found out that what they’d been doing in fun was killing them. For some it was already too late. Joel and I found ourselves going to too many hospitals followed by too many funerals. That was before they found the drugs to put it on hold. Sometimes I didn’t even know the guy but I’d go along so Joel didn’t have to face it alone, wondering what was happening in his own bloodstream and when the trodden-on rake would jump up and smack him in the face, a favourite image of Dad’s for disaster lying in wait.

What first brought us together was his accent. ‘You come from Gateshead?’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

‘My parents sound just like you.’

‘So what happened to you?’

‘I was born here. Corrupted from birth.’

I can do it of course, talk like Mam and Dad, but it’s fake, imitation, acting. Like assuming a foreign language that you know well. Sometimes my parents make the duty trip to see ageing relatives. ‘Gateshead Revisited,’ Dad cracks. I’ve gone with them when I was still at school, seeing the streets where they were born, touring the homes of great-aunts and cousins. Feeling just that: a tourist. Roger always managed to slide out of it somehow with exams or football: a game he couldn’t miss.

‘It’s the Sunday dinners I can’t face,’ he once admitted to me. ‘As if time had stood still up there with meat and two veg, Yorkshire pudding swimming in gravy, tinned fruit and ersatz topping.’ His corners are smoother or rounder than mine and he can trade on being a man and the indulgent smiles that still brings to excuse him. At home with Jenny it’s watercress soup and pasta with pears belle Helene, or whatever manifestation of the latest nouvelle cuisine, the fashionable foodie commonplace for a time until the next chic chef woks it out.

‘What’s all the excitement?’ Joel asked after we’d sat down with our pints, his Guinness, mine bitter. It was a bit of old Gateshead I’d learned from Dad and still stuck to. It will all change now with the opening of the Baltic Museum and the gentrification of the Northeast.

I wasn’t ready to tell Joel I’d fallen for someone at the office party. After all nothing might come of it. She might not seek me out and if she bumped into me, or more likely sidled past in the corridor, she’d avoid eye contact, perhaps pretend we hadn’t met at all. No it was too soon for confession. There would have to be something to confess first. So I stalled with: ‘I was afraid we might be getting set in our ways, stale, that’s all.’

My passion for the older woman had begun after uni though it didn’t extend to Margaret Thatcher who was still reigning at the time. I found myself speculating about other members of staff, wondering if they saw through me or if I was as opaque to them as they were to me. Not that I was hiding anything. They could infer what they liked from my not taking part in the girl chat of the staff ladies’ loo. Susie Jubal was one, power dressing CEO whose smooth black suiting, elegant sheer tights and high heels gave me a frisson whenever I was called in to draft a new contract. Not that I had much time for dalliance with the hard evening graft of Bar studies. Even my visits to another sort of bar with Joel had to become rare treats or necessary diversions.

Joel worked for the NHS as an accountant and taught an evening course at his local uni upgraded from an old poly. Now there are so many of those about you’d wonder why anyone would think it worthwhile to start something like Wessex. There has to be an ulterior motive in its founding, as a front for the Temple of the Latent Christ or some kind of fundraising scam. I pick up the phone and dial their number. Maybe a more oblique approach than rattling the bars of the gates will get me further.

Listening to the recorded voice on the other end I make notes. At the end I press hash and leave Joel’s name and address, an arrangement we have for when I want to stay anonymous. He’ll ring me when a message or packet comes. I’ve asked for the full kit of courses and application forms. The anonymous but faintly North American and female voice tells me: ‘Wessex University is closed right now. We shall reopen on 3 May. Meanwhile you can visit our website…’ I think it’s time I saw Dr Adrian Gilbert again.

‘Can you come to my office? The college is still closed but now I’ve read more of the Boston memorial there are questions, issues I think we should discuss.’

I arrange for him to come the next day. It doesn’t seem a problem. He has plenty of time on his hands. I can spend the intervening hours carrying on with Amyntas, as I think of him/her, and reading up on tribunal procedure. Meanwhile I search for traces of Amyntas Boston on the internet, surfing the International Genealogical Index, that useful tool set up by the curious theology of the Mormons of Salt Lake City. There are only births and marriages. Deaths don’t interest them since the purpose of the Index is to retrospectively initiate your ancestor into the true church and thereby guarantee them immortality. Briefly I wonder where the dead have been hanging out all this time waiting for their resurrection on screen. Still, out of strange acorns useful oak trees grow.

But there’s no mention of Amyntas or Amaryllis being born in Salisbury at the right sort of time or at all. There is a Robert Boston nearby at Broad Chalke who married Margaret Brown on 26 September 1588, the year of the Armada; and they had two daughters in the following two years, Joan and Mary. And that’s all.

Where else to go? I try the surname Boston and am sent to a History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey. The index says just: ‘Boston, Salisbury physician.’ But it’s enough to get me out of my chair and pacing the room. I print out the reference. I need a library. At last somebody knows, knew about a Salisbury Boston and a physician at that. Is it her dad or Amyntas herself? I have to find out. I try booksearch.com.

Well at least they’ve heard of John Aubrey but they can only offer me a second-hand classic reprint of his Brief Lives, though it does look as if it’s the same guy. So I need a library and not any old library. I need the best. I need to get on my bike and head for Euston and the Inca courts of the British Library itself. Though now I think it might be asking for my darling to be nicked to abandon it in the backstreets of Euston. I lock up the office and pick my way past the morning drunks under their newspaper wrappers through the stinking gloom of the underpass up into the airy station concourse with its Eurostar promise of not-too-distant foreign parts of wine and women if not song, and into the gullet of the tube, almost running down the escalator steps while the halt and old hang on to the right-hand rail.

An hour later I’ve filled in the form with family history, seventeenth century as my area of study, got my pass, and am climbing up to the reading room, hushed, packed with seekers and the acolytes who serve them. There’s more than one copy of my book. Which shall I go for? Not the earliest because it’s in a special category, hedged around with access barriers no doubt to stop it being stolen. I wonder what it would fetch on the antiquarian market.

I decide on an edition of 1848 as a compromise and sit back to wait for it. Then I think I could use the time seeing what I can find on the open shelves and I’m just about to get up and browse when, hey presto, here’s my book. It’s a bigger size than books today, with thick cardboardy yellowed pages. It’s been mended at some time and when I open the dried-blood cover it lies very flat as if exhausted, worn out. A faint memory comes to me. Is it the smell or the feel of the thick paper? The memory is of being about six and walking in crocodile through the Acton streets, always it seemed shrouded in winter, from our primary school to the redbrick Gothic of the public library where we were allowed to choose our books in the children’s section with its low, brightly painted chairs, posters and smell of damp wool. Outside in the streets we passed among people who must have been young but seemed old to us, walking about in clothes as bright as our kiddy furniture, young men like the dandies in history books with cavalier hair. Fluid, always on the run, they seemed to dance along the muddy streets. Their pastel flairs were stained six inches up the leg with the puddle water thrown up by passing cars. Yet I remember they appeared cheerful and trusting, unlike my parents, Rob and Linda, born in that unimaginable, except to them, before-the-war time and tarred with its sobering brush.

I turn to the index. There’s no mention of Boston. I try Gilbert. And there he is: Adrian; I look up his entry. It’s in a section where the writer says: ‘I shall now pass to the illustrious Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke’ under the heading: ‘Of Learned Men that had Pensions Granted to them by the Earls of Pembroke’. First comes the bit about Gilbert, confirming Amyntas’ story in the memorial, and then pay dirt.

There lived in Wilton, in those days, one Mr Boston, a Salisbury man (his father was a brewer there) who was a great chymist, and did great cures by his art. The Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke did much esteem him for his skill, and would have had him to be her operator, and live with her, but he would not accept of her Ladyship’s kind offer. But after long search after the philosopher’s stone, he died at Wilton, having spent his estate. After his death they found in his laboratory two or three baskets of egg shells, which I remember Geber saith, is a principal ingredient of that stone.

I head for the photocopying department. My find lies like the philosopher’s stone itself faintly glowing in my briefcase as I make my way home again.

Geber, Geber, who was Geber? Google tracks him down: ‘Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to the Western world as Geber, Muslim alchemist of the eighth century. Put forward the Sulphur Mercury theory of the origin of metals based on abstraction from experiments with naturally occurring red ore or cinnabar, a form of mercury oxide which when heated produces quicksilver and sulphurous fumes. According to this theory fire was sulphur or brimstone; mercury was water. Not however the substances themselves but the abstractions: combustibility and fusibility.’ Wow!

That’s Amyntas’ experiment before the countess’ ladies. You can see how those old alchemists were trying to feel their way to some universal theory that would explain everything. Wasn’t that what Einstein was after towards the end of his life? Every so often along comes someone with a discovery or a theory that seems to have the answer: particle physics, relativity, static state cosmology, DNA and the genome. But there’s always another question unanswered beyond it, even if the theory itself stands up. A new dimension, a micro universe we can’t see into or space we can’t penetrate. Will we ever? Or will we destroy ourselves or be smashed into our elements by an asteroid before we can find out? Every new thing we discover only seems to make the universe bigger and us smaller. Shrinking man. There ought to be pride in what we know but mostly there’s only fear. Is that why so many attempts at an alternative answer are popular now? Because we can’t face it. It’s too big for us. Like the Temple of the Latent Christ offers its believers. Do what we tell you and you’ll be all right, saved when the universe blows apart.

Maybe I’m wrong to be digging into all this. What seemed a simple case to make some bread is leading me into a cross between Star Wars and The Moral Maze. Heavy bananas, Jade. Cool it. Get back to the kitchen and cook up something solid. Get real.

An evening with the Gaos pushing out the noodles and chop suey will bring me down to earth.

‘Mary,’ I say as she hands me the small brown carrier bags to pack into my vacuum box, ‘I hope your cousin is careful to have all his papers in order. The police are very hard on illegals these days.’

Mary often interprets for her parents when a precise meaning is important. That’s why I’m telling this to her. ‘Oh he is very careful, Jade. He has his attendance sheet signed regularly at the college to show he is real student.’

‘Well if there’s ever anything I can do to help…’

‘That is kind of you, Jade.’

I realise she doesn’t know what I do when I’m not riding delivery for them. ‘It’s just that I studied law…’ I trail off, not wanting to put myself forward, not wanting them to think they’ve been deceived and I’m not what I’ve seemed these past few months.

‘I will remember, Jade, if there is any trouble, thank you.’

In the morning I’m up betimes as old Pepys had it, determined to get some answers out of Gilbert. His cheque has been lying in my desk drawer since he gave it to me while I make up my mind whether I’m taking his case or not. Now I think I’ll have a look at his writing and see if I can tell anything from it. I take out the cheque, still folded neatly in half as he passed it across the desk. I never look at clients’ cheques in front of them, out of some deep-seated embarrassment about money learnt from Linda and Rob. First it would be rude, as if you doubted their honesty. Second, it would infringe one of the sacred tenets such as: never flash your cash in public or even count it; never inspect cheques or query bills. The financial delicacies of a vanished age when a gentleman’s word was his bond and to show an interest in lucre, your own or someone else’s, was vulgar and bourgeois. Now we reel from fraud to scandal with our creative accounting and ethos of grab-all-you-can in this free-market free-for-all where the Darwinian survival of the fittest is jungle law.

I flatten the cheque and study the writing. Very small and neat like a monastic script. The date, my own name, the amount. Hang about. It isn’t Gilbert’s signature. The name on the cheque is Alastair Galton. I can’t wait for his buzz on the entry phone to confront him. I’m trying out opening questions in my head such as ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you playing at?’ But while I’m waiting I run a quick search on this new name and get a complete blank. At least Adrian Gilbert existed, once upon a time. This guy is totally unknown. The buzzer sounds; punctual as usual. I let him in. I say good morning, shake hands and sit him down. I’m careful not to address him by name.

‘You haven’t paid in my cheque, Ms Green.’

The breath is almost knocked out of me by his audacity. ‘That’s because I didn’t recognise the name on the cheque,’ I lie.

‘I rather expected you to query it on the telephone.’

‘You told me when we first met that you were Dr Adrian Gilbert.’

‘The “Dr” is correct.’

‘Why did you give me a false name? I warned you about trying to deceive your own lawyer.’

‘Yes, you did. Quite properly. But you see when I first came to you, you weren’t my lawyer. I knew nothing about you. I wanted to see how suitable you were before I entrusted my case to you. You are, after all, very young and…’

‘And a woman?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Dr Galton, if that is your name, there’s enough gender discrimination in the legal profession already without you adding to it.’

‘Have you decided to represent me?’

‘Have you decided you really want me to with my obvious disabilities?’

‘I haven’t cancelled the cheque.’

‘And I haven’t paid it in. So we have reached some kind of stalemate.’

‘Stasis equilibrium, you could say.’

What the fuck am I doing with this guy? Do I need all this? ‘I think we should begin again. Your name is really Alastair Galton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you pick the name of Adrian Gilbert?’

‘I regard him as some sort of spiritual ancestor.’

‘Why are you anxious to identify with a long dead necromancer, the friend of John Dee who was both self-deceiving and deceived others and was conned in his turn?’

‘I see you have been doing your homework, Ms Green. That’s good. Gilbert was in many ways a brilliant man. He lived at a time still deficient in information whereas, we’re told, we live in the information society although I’m not ever quite sure what that means, and perhaps we too are deceiving ourselves. You know as well as being a respected physician he was involved in navigation and the quest for the Northwest Passage. He was a fine mathematician, a would-be discoverer who never put to sea.’

‘An astrologer?’

‘So was Sir Isaac Newton, a scientific genius comparable in his own field to Shakespeare, in a time when astrology and true astronomy shaded into each other.’

‘Still, why pick his name?’

‘Because he is part of the story. And also I wanted to give you a clue, an Ariadne’s thread to follow to see whether you could find your way out.’

It may indeed be my way out. You were testing me.’

‘And you have come through splendidly if I may say so.’

‘Dr Galton, there’s something you should understand now before we go any further, if we are to go further. I may be younger than you and female but I will not be patronised. It wouldn’t be the first time either that I turned something down because I refused to be patronised.’

Suddenly I see the counsel room at Settle and Fixit and the senior partner, Henry Radipole, saying to James Chalmers, and only half joking: ‘Can’t you keep your wife under control?’ when she had tried to intervene in the discussion of a case they’d both been working on.

It’s difficult for a man of my generation…’

‘I know you are in your late forties. Young enough to know better. Who is Dr Alastair Galton?’

There’s a pause while he decides what to tell me. I stare him out across the desk.

‘Very well then. I am nobody. I tell you to save you the trouble of looking because you will find nothing on me in any reference book. I once published a monograph on white witches, long out of print. You, I imagine, will have looked me up on that thing,’ he waves a hand at my desktop PC, ‘and the internet where they will know nothing of me either. I still prefer books myself of course. I see that electric gadget not as an instrument for greater knowledge and freedom but as an instrument for censorship, as a spoon-feeder which supplies you with what other people think you should know. You will find my doctorate in the records of the University of London at Senate House, together with a copy of my thesis.’

‘What was it on?’

‘Oh, witchcraft of course.’ He smiles.

‘They gave you a doctorate for that?’

‘It was presented as a revisitation of Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe which a number of people, academics that is, in the seventies had tried to discredit.’

I’m lost. I don’t know where this conversation is going. ‘To get back to your CV.’

‘I followed the usual course, a BA in history, and my doctorate. Then I found a nice little post in a teacher training college.’

‘The original before Wessex, St Walburgha?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘Presumably you weren’t engaged to teach young ladies witchcraft.’

Galton, as I now have to think of him, even gives another little smile. ‘That was my private research. I taught them just the conventional history they would need to pass on to their pupils.’

‘So you stayed when Wessex took over?’

‘I had to apply for the new job in the normal way. When St Walburgha’s amalgamated with the BEd course at the local university I could have applied for a post there. In fact I did but the competition was very fierce. Status you see. And then I saw that Wessex was recruiting.’

‘Can anyone set up as a university? Don’t there have to be standards, regulations?’

‘You have to be registered of course with the appropriate examining authority and inspected. Your qualifications have to be validated. They’ve jumped through all the right hoops. On the surface and for about a foot below they’re bona fide. It’s what lies beneath and behind…’

‘And the Boston memorial? Where did that come from?’

‘I found it in a bookshop specialising in incunabula and early manuscripts. I have quite a collection.’

‘What interested you particularly in this book?’

‘It was leafing through and realising that it was all in cipher, except that on the last blank page someone had written a key to the names represented by numbers in the text and Adrian Gilbert’s name caught my eye.’

‘You knew about him already?’

‘His name had cropped up from time to time.’

‘Dr Galton, what exactly did you give your students to read?’

‘I would prefer you to finish the whole book, or no, not perhaps that, but at least to have decided to represent me before we pursue that any further.’

I let that pass. ‘Were you able to decipher the book yourself?’ I think I know the answer to this from Amyntas’ own words that she had used a cipher of her father’s but two can play this game of testing.

‘I could read it myself. It uses a fairly common, common to the alchemists that is, set of symbols, combined with a simple alphabetical displacement code.’

‘No need for a Ventris then.’ There’s something about Galton that makes me show off in this childish way, as if we’re in some schoolboy competition. ‘I’ve sent for an information pack from Wessex to get more background on them. Maybe I’ll register for a course just to get inside. Would you be willing to pay the fee if I decide it’s the only way in?’

‘Then you’ll take my case?’

‘I still don’t know if you have one. This is just preparatory investigation.’

For the first time the irritating smugness drops away and he looks really gutted. I mustn’t start feeling sorry for the guy and give more than I’m ready to out of pity.

‘When will you make up your mind?’

‘I’ll call you,’ I say, ‘when I’ve come to some decision.’

‘Please at least pay in my cheque for what you’ve already done. Expenses must have been incurred…’

‘As long as it isn’t regarded by you as a contract.’ I type out a receipt with disclaimer and print it off. Galton signs it meekly. We shake hands. And yet I know I’ll take the case and not just because I need the bread. I’m hooked, like falling in love. You don’t feel the gaff go in that flips you gasping on to the bank, however much you twist and turn. You ignore the stab of the knives you’re suddenly walking on like the Little Mermaid, out of your rational element, in thin air that’s heady with the ecstasy of lust or power or the thrill of the chase.

I think those words of my lady’s contriving will never leave me that I learned the next day and rehearsed with Secretary Samford in the forenoon. They are here with me now in my cell and I repeat them like some old receipt against the madness that threatens, for if I should lose my reason I should indeed lose all.

The secretary began with the words of old Thenot:

I sing divine Astrea’s praise,

O Muses! Help my wittes to raise

And heave my verses higher.

Then I was to answer as Piers:

Thou needst the truth but plainly tell,

Which much I doubt thou canst not well,

Thou art so oft a liar.

And so we jousted through the verses in our litany of praise.

He:

Astrea is our chiefest joy,

Our chiefest guard against annoy,

Our chiefest wealth, our treasure.

I:

Where chiefest are, there others be

To us none else but only she.

When wilt thou speak in measure?

He:

Astrea may be justly sayd,

A field in flowry robe arrayed,

In season freshly springing.

I:

That spring endures but shortest time,

This never leaves Astrea’s clime,

Thou liest instead of singing.

Thenot:

As heavenly light that guides the day

Right so doth shine each lovely ray

That from Astrea flyeth.

Piers:

Nay darkness oft that light enclouds

Astrea’s beams no darkness shrouds.

How loudly Thenot lyeth.

Coming all too soon as it seemed to me to the last verse he began:

Then Piers of friendship tell me why,

My meaning true, my words should lie

And strive in vain to raise her.

I answered:

Words from conceit do only rise,

Above conceit her honour flies;

But silence, naught can praise her.

As we ended we both fell upon our knees before the countess, for we spoke in homage to her who was our queen indeed however she might have writ for another and greater. I was aware of the richness of her dress of her favourite white silk sewn all over with pearls and the intricacy of her lace at throat and wrists, floating gossamer against the darkness of the hall as the winter day passed, lit only by sconces and the leaping flames from the hearth. There was much applause and our lady rising to her feet clapped her hands too and cried out, ‘Excellently done. I would that her majesty herself had seen it. Let more candles be brought and the music play now for dancing. Come, Piers who would praise by silence, and lead me out. I would not have you dumb for ever.’

‘Madam, as I have never acted before so too I have never danced.’

‘It is only to put one foot before the other in time to the music. Give me your hand. You will soon learn. Was there no dancing in your father’s house?’

‘His only visitors were old grey physicians like himself.’

‘Dancing is good for body and mind. You will see you have only to observe what others do and all is easy.’

So I learned to lead my lady by her soft hand, to turn her about and gaze into her face and bow, and all the while my heart felt caged in my chest like some animal that would break forth. When the music stopped I bowed deeply and handed her to her chair where she sat fanning herself while she watched the other dancers. ‘We must have back the dancing master who taught my children so that you may learn new steps to please me, Amyntas.’

‘As my lady pleases.’

‘Your lady does please. There is no one else here I care to dance with.’

Though my head swam with pleasure at this, nevertheless I saw that such a liking was dangerous if perceived by others, for now Mistress Griffiths approached and asked if she might borrow my lady’s dancing partner and on permission being given she said as we took our place: ‘Do not count on my lady’s favour to last for ever, boy, pretty as you are. Great ones are ever fickle and you will find yourself soon cast aside when your beard begins to grow and pustules come on that pretty cheek.’

I quickly learned that where it had been my lady’s pleasure to encourage me, it was Mistress Griffiths’ to cause me to stumble. My lady had put out her hand to guide me even as she made it seem that the taking was mine. Mistress Griffiths held back so that I did not know which way to move until I got the trick of watching my neighbour from the corner of my eye.

‘You have much to learn of women as well as dancing,’ Mistress Griffiths said as we bowed to each other at the end of the coranto.

‘You must dance with the other my ladies Amyntas, or they will be jealous. But you must return to me again.’

So I took out each one in turn and whether it was the music, the motion or the touching of hands and meeting of eyes, I felt myself lifted up in an eager body, proud and full of a new quick spirit that found an answer in my partners. Then I thought of Thenot’s words in praise of Astrea that she was both a ‘manly palm and a maiden boy’ and that I was myself indeed the two in one. And I found that I could cause the maidens I danced with, apart from Mistress Griffiths, to raise their eyes to mine and then to cast them down again simply by my own gaze upon their faces.

My lady too observed all this which was a kind of play acting, and whispered laughing. ‘Have a care, Amyntas, or you will have all the ladies in love with you and what does the player say: “that they had better love a dream”.’ Then she sighed. ‘How my brother would have smiled to see his Arcadia played out in this sport of ours. But you must beware Mistress Griffiths who is not as enamoured of you as the rest or inclined to fall under your spell. Her eye is on marriage for wealth and position not an idle dalliance with one of neither. She may yet unmask you and then I cannot save you.’

I should have taken warning from this but I was too dazzled and besides she said it laughing as a thing of no importance and as if she jested merely.

The next day I took a quiet horse and rode into Salisbury, pausing on the brow of the hill before the city to look down at the spires of its churches rising above the huddle of roofs, and, taller than all, the great needle of the cathedral piercing the winter sky. I rode down to the market where stalls were set up for the goose fair with all manner of birds, fishes and sweetmeats for the Christmas feast.

I was afraid the noise would alarm the horse so I dismounted to lead it. Suddenly a young pig that had been tethered by a leg to a post bit through the thong that bound it and set off through the market square with a hue and cry after it. A young boy was nimblest and at last contrived to throw himself upon the piglet and pin it to the ground and was given a groat for his pains. Away from the market, and in the din of birds clucking in their baskets, wheels over cobbles and the bawling of the hucksters I mounted again and turned right through Green Croft, past the Pheasant and up towards our house beside St Edmund’s church where I had lived in what seemed a whole life ago. Now the house must be another’s. I stared at its dark windows and felt in a sudden rush the loss of my father as I had not done before then, so that tears came into my eyes. I had not wept till now.

As I sat there on the patient animal whose flanks were wreathed in the mist of its own breath in the frosty air, a door was opened to the house of our former neighbour, Dame Milburn.

‘Why is that you Master Boston? I came out to see who had stopped at our door on such a fine horse. I am glad to see you for I have a packet that was come for your father and I not knowing where to send have kept it these three months.’ And she was gone back into the house before I could speak but soon to return with what I perceived from the shape must be a book. I got down from the horse to take it from her.

‘Why,’ she began again, ‘how you have grown and in such fine clothes too. Where may I find you if another such should come?’

‘I am in the Countess of Pembroke’s service and go with her wherever she goes to any of her houses but you may send for me at the great house at Wilton for her people there will know where she lies.’

‘And what news of your sister? Is she not married?’

‘She goes where I go, and is not yet married nor like to be. I thank you for this. I shall go into the church and say a prayer for my father.’

‘He was always a kind man to me and gave me physick freely whenever I was sick.’

‘And you would give us some of your baking in return.’

‘You shall have some now, Master Boston, for your father’s sake. I was all day baking yesterday against Christmas when my daughter will come visiting with her husband and little ones. But there is enough and to spare.’ And she was gone back into the house to return a moment later with an apple turnover in a napkin which she pressed upon me.

‘Thank you mistress. I will eat it on my journey back to Wilton.’

I tethered my horse to the lychgate of St Edmund’s and went inside. I knelt above where I knew my father lay in the side aisle. Yet I could neither feel his presence nor find words to pray. Instead I vowed that one day he should have a monument upon the wall close by that all should know a great physician lay there who might have found out all the secrets of the world, one who was not proud but healed the poor and sick, that would not become a great lady’s lapdog. Then I began to question myself that I should be her amusement and be played with for her sport. But I was like a linnet straining at a silken leash who fears lest she indeed break it and be let fly away into hunger and dark.

Soon I too grew cold and got to my feet again. It was as if a portcullis had come down between me and my old life so that I could only look through the bars but not touch what lay beyond. And how would it be if the gate were drawn up and I were thrust out, with the gate fallen to behind me and no way back? How could I enter again that former world?

When I got back to Wilton it was nearly dark, the day being so short. ‘My lady is calling for you,’ the secretary said in a great fluster and wringing of hands. ‘You must go to her at once in her chamber.’

‘May I not shift my clothes a little?’ for they were greasy and stained from riding.

‘No you must come at once.’

So I entered where my lady was pacing the floor and fell on my knee before her.

‘Where have you been? How dare you be absent when I need you.’

‘Madam I went to visit my old home and pray in the church where my father lies.’

‘Yes, yes. Well I suppose we must excuse filial piety. What have you there?’

‘I was still holding the little packet. It was something that came for my father. Our old neighbour gave it to me.’

‘Let us see what is in it. We are in need of some diversion. Bring it here.’

And when I had given it to her: ‘I cannot read the marks on the seal.’ Her soft white fingers broke the red wax on the covering. ‘It must be undone fully to reveal its secret.’ Again her hands moved to press back the wrapping. ‘I believe it is a book.’ She took it out and opened the front cover. A letter was tucked inside it. ‘What is this? A book of love poems? De Magnete. The work of William Gilbert, physician to the queen’s majesty. The letter is addressed to your father. What does it say Amyntas?’

She handed it to me. I unfolded it and began to read. ‘He does not know that my father is no longer living. It says madam, that he would value my father’s opinion on the book, whether his idea be right or no. He hopes that my father is well and continuing with his experiments. That they are both old men with little time before them and must do what they can while they may.’ I felt the tears begin to start in my eyes again.

‘You weep for your father child, as I weep still for my brother,’ the countess said putting out a hand to take mine. ‘That is becoming in you.’ The tears still flowed but at her touch I felt again the rush of heat in my secrets and my heart rise up in my chest as if to burst. ‘Ah Amyntas, you are too soft-hearted. The world is a harsh place,’ and she drew me to her, pressing me to her bosom where with the scent of her and its touch I felt myself near to swooning.

‘Go and shift yourself child,’ she said pushing me from her. ‘You stink of horseflesh. Come back to me when you smell more sweet.’

‘That will be never then madam,’ Mistress Griffiths said for she had stood by all this time in the hope to hear my lady chide me or even to see me put out of her service.

I hurried then to shift myself as the countess bid lest Mistress Griffiths should do me an injury in my absence. Taking a sconce I made my way along the dark passages to the armoire by my pallet where I was used to hang my clothes, and rinsed my hands and face in a basin of rosewater for sweetness. But when I returned to my lady’s chamber I found her mood altogether changed. Signor Ferrabosco had been sent for to sing to her a song of her brother Sir Philip.

What have I thus betrayed my liberty?

Can those black beams such burning marks engrave

In my free side? Or am I born a slave

Whose neck becomes such yoke of tyranny?

Virtue awake, beauty but beauty is.

I may, I must, I can, I will do

Leave following that, which it is gain to miss.

Let her go: soft, but here she comes go to,

Unkind, I love you not: O me, that eye

Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie.

The last sighings of the lute strings died away. ‘Are my dear brother’s verses not beyond compare? When will there be some such another again? Bring me my purse Mr Samford.’ And she took from it a gold piece and gave it to the musician. ‘You have earned this not just by the composing of the music but by the singing and playing of it. Even Tom Morley could not have set it better. But it has made me melancholy. What sport have we?’

‘Madam,’ the duenna said, ‘the mummers await you in the great hall with their play of Christemas as is your custom to see and hear at this season, if it please you now. Or they may come again another time.’

‘No let us go in to them. Their antics will lift this blackness from me.’

So we took our places with the whole household gathered together and the mummers began on their play of St George and the Turkish Knight that was such a piece of flummery, with its quack physician, Dame Betty, and mock fights between the two knights, that my lady was soon laughing. Then they fell to a morris with pipe and tabor, with fool and hobby horse and finally to the wassail: ‘God bless the mistress of the house’, which pleased my lady so much she clapped her hands to it and rose up to dance herself with me.

After, Mr Samford led them away to be feasted and given their Christmas box and we too went to our supper. That night it began to snow and in the morning it lay a carpet six inches deep. Nevertheless we took coaches and with my lady’s chaplain rode into Salisbury to be there for public prayer for the Nativity with great solemnity and excellent singing of the cathedral choristers. Then we returned to dine in great state off many dishes of fish, meat and fowl brought in with a flourish by the servingmen accompanied on the fiddles. Many healths were drunk to her majesty, the countess, the country of Wiltshire, Wilton and the gentry present, for there had come several from roundabout with their wives to celebrate with my lady. There we drank also to absent friends, the young earl and other of the countess’ children as Master Philip who stayed with his tutor in Oxford and the Lady Anne who lay with her aunt at Penshurst so that my brains swam, for as a man I dare not refuse to drink as the ladies might.

At last feeling my head begin to sink towards the trestle I staggered to my feet, bowed to my lady and left the hall as if going to piss. Unsure of finding my way to the jakes, I went out into the frosty night under the Great Bear hanging above, and hid myself behind a bush to lower my slops, hoping that no other would come out with the same intention and find me half squatting with my slops around my ankles. I had thought the cold air would clear my head but it had an effect quite otherwise. I feared but longed to lie down in the snow and sleep, yet forced myself back into the house where I found my own straw pallet, lay down and at once fell into a kind of swoon.

The next morning I found myself suited as I had lain down with much relief that none had tried to undress me. My head still swam, but after a manchet of bread and some ale I was able to go to my lady who was still in her bed. I was afraid that she would be angry with me but instead she laughed and held out her hand for me to kiss.

‘Well child, there were those who wished to wake you for some sport but I saved you from them, for I thought you slept so sweetly with your mouth open. They would have thrown you into the horse trough.’

‘My lady is very kind.’ I had put on a clean shirt and hose and was relieved that I had not soiled my slops while I slept or rather lay in my drunken swoon.

I had seen no more of Dr Gilbert since our first meeting. He was gone again to Devon to lie with his friends there, being of those parts. Now however when the feast was over he returned to the countess. I had determined not to quarrel with him but to keep my counsel if he should ask me anything. Only in matters touching my father I knew I could not be silent so I heard of his return with some trepidation.

My lady had let it be known that the next day she would take up her care of the sick again that morning. There came a great press of poor persons to be cured, the weather being foul and winter sickness about. Some had fallen in the snow and gashed themselves. Others wanted for potions and medicines to take back to those too sick to go abroad themselves.

All morning we were viewing and anointing and binding up, and after they were sent by my lady to the kitchen for bread, ale, broth and broken meats from her own table for many ailed more from hunger than any other sickness. My head cleared as I was kept running, fetching and carrying, grinding and mixing for the poor wretches who sought our help.

At length when we had but one man more to cure that had slipped and broken his head, to which my lady laid self-heal as an unguent and bound it with a clean rag, came in Dr Gilbert to us.

‘You are too good madam in treating these wastrels. No doubt the man was drunk when he fell and came here in search of more ale to mend his head.’

‘I do not doubt it Dr Gilbert. Yet it must be mended or he cannot work and he and his family will fall as a charge upon the parish which we must all bear.’

He had no answer to this except to bow his head in acceptance of her reasoning.

‘Amyntas,’ she went on, ‘fetch here the book that was sent to your father. I would have Dr Gilbert’s opinion on it.’

Most unwillingly I went for it but yet I dare not disobey her.

‘This is scarcely new,’ he said when he had opened it. ‘This was out a year almost before your lord’s death.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she answered. ‘Matters do not reach us here so swiftly as in London. And it has lain in a neighbour’s house for some months, she not knowing where to send it. But this William Gilbert is he not of your family?’

‘Indeed no madam for he comes from the eastern parts, Suffolk or Essex as I believe though I have seen him often at court.’

‘But the matter of the book?’

‘I have spoken of it with Mr Francis Bacon. He believes there may be some use in it to find out latitude in navigation but he thinks little of such theories when they do not tend to the practical. He believes that only experiment or chance can discover useful truths, not idle speculation upon causes.’

‘What do you think Amyntas?’

I saw that I trod on dangerous ground. ‘I have not yet had the chance to read it madam so can have no opinion.’

‘Come you must do better than that.’

‘If the world is a magnet madam and as some say, and my father believed, in perpetual motion about the sun, would we not be flung off among the other planets if there were not some force to bind us to the earth, as a lodestone draws and holds metal? And since knowledge gives rise to more and we can sometimes build as an arch from one part of knowledge to another by taking thought, then I think theory may be of good use when purified in the fire of practice.’

‘Ingenious boy. What do you to that Dr Gilbert?’

‘I think I may stick upon the wisdom of her majesty’s counsel rather than a mere boy. When were you at the university Master Boston?’

‘Never sir. My tutoring was all from my father. He too believed in the virtues of experiment, like Mr Bacon, as you say sir.’

‘And how came he to know her majesty’s physician?’

‘I believe they met sir at the Royal College of Physicians when my father had gone there about some business while Dr Gilbard, as he often writ his name, was treasurer. And he was often also wont to seek my father’s opinion, saying that he was uncorrupted by the court or the quest for money or position.’

‘Yet he looked to turn base metal into gold.’

‘He looked only for the truth sir not for private gain. He would have made his knowledge available to all the world had he come by it, and not hoarded it like a miser.’

‘So he may have said but we do not know how his resolution would have kept.’

I was silent then for I knew from my father that Dr Gilbert’s pursuit of truth had been often directed towards gain and the filling of his own pockets as in his brother’s settling of Newfoundland and quest for the Northwest Passage, in which Dr Gilbert was a mover but not to the hazarding his own person.

When he had left us the countess said: ‘Now child I must to Cardiff to see to my affairs there and I shall take my ladies with me, and in special Mistress Griffiths to visit her friends but you will return to Ramsbury where you will be safe until my return. Meanwhile you will not be idle for I shall give all my works in the laboratory and the curing the sick into your hands.’

Joel rings to say he has post for me and he will drop it in on his way to see a client. I offer him a cup of coffee but he declines ‘your instant filth’. The traffic’s all snarled up and he’s running late. We make a date to meet in Finch’s, one of the last unmade-over pubs in London. I settle back when he’s gone and open the info pack for Wessex: glossy brochures, application forms, CD-ROM, courses, credentials, fees, minimum qualifications for enrolment in the various subjects. I see that whereas they’re obviously keen to attract as many students as possible with all kinds of subjects including Open University home study-type options, the theology department is a closed shop. You have to be studying for acceptance into the Temple for an ordinary diploma course and be already received for the full-blown degree. It looks as if they’re teaching a very selective kind of theology here.

How do I get in without revealing something of my hand? Assume a completely false identity? A birth certificate would do. And some fake academic documents. By the time they got round to checking them, if they did, it should be all over. University exam verification offices are notoriously slow. Now I come to think of it I’ve already got an alternative birth certificate from a previous job. An Aussie girl about my age who needed to prove her nationality, or at least her parents’, for a work permit. I had two copies made in case one went astray. The second should still be in my file. Her name, let’s see, was Lucinda Jane Cowell, Lucy to her mates. I could become her. Her parents had emigrated when she was one year old and had become naturalised Roos but none of that showed on her birth certificate.

Suppose they tracked her down wherever she is now? But that was eighteen months ago. She’s probably long gone backpacking round the world, enjoying Thailand on her way home. ‘Nothing venture, Jade,’ Mam would say. It’s strange that Wessex doesn’t encourage its would-be students to go through UCAS. Is that another sign that we’re dealing with something different here?

I can’t see myself signing up to the Temple just to get on the theology course. Who knows what you might be letting yourself in for? Maybe though I can show an interest enough to suss it out. Or rather Lucy Cowell can show an interest. Nobody is what they seem. Dr Adrian Gilbert turns out to be Dr Alastair Galton, if that really is his name, Amyntas is Amaryllis and I’m becoming Lucy. It’s a kind of virtual shapechanging. These days everything is ephemeral, smoke drifting into different forms, gone in a minute while we long for stability, certainty and look back to what seems a more solid world of truly visceral pain and passion, Mam and Dad’s world. But who’d really go back if they could? No. Yet if only we could carry the best on with us. Some sense of belonging, even of being. Maybe that’s what the Temple of the Latent Christ offers believers: the passion we’ve lost. Or is it just you, Jade, who’s fallen into limbo?

Even my love for Helen Chalmers that seemed so searing at the time became, after that first flood of anger, betrayal and absence, a dull ache, a long drawn-out mourning. ‘Men have died and worms have eaten them but not for love.’ You don’t die, not as a rule, but something dies in you. ‘I die daily,’ as the man said. The body goes on, the cells rejuvenate until even they get tired of it and only mad cancer cells go on and on, endlessly multiplying until they consume their host like a parasitic wasp.

Gloomy thoughts, Jade. Click on delete. They’ll still be there though, the spectral texts that a clever anorak can always flush out again. Nothing need ever die that we create now except the creators. But then that’s not new. Our best has outlived us for thousands of years. Now the worst can outlive us too. Only the means to get at it may be lost with the built-in obsolescence of our technologies. Secrets, works of genius even, locked up on hard disks in landfill sites all over the world. What would Marlowe have done with email and the internet? Sat in his office like me or pulled on his hat and raincoat and gone out into the mist?

I make myself get up and go to the filing cabinet. Find Lucy Cowell’s file neatly under ‘C’. Something a bit anal in the way you keep your files, Jade. Still it works, so don’t knock it. Now a little desktop publishing to produce some convincing qualifications. ‘A’ levels and a BA so that Lucy can get into an MA or PHD course. She needs a subject and a title for a thesis. The psychology of cross-dressing in Elizabethan theatre. Amyntas should come in handy there. Back to my first love before I decided to make a living out of the law’s delays.

I make perfect digital copies of my own certificates, white out my name, recopy. Fill in with Lucinda Jane Cowell. There: Jade Green’s deleted. ‘Do you really want to delete Jade Green?’ Only for now. ‘If you select “Yes” this file will be deleted.’ Death by a thousand clicks. Death by a mouse byte. But I have the original. I am the original. ‘Prick us. Do we not bleed?’ Fill in the forms. Joel’s address. My mobile phone number. My second email address, the one that’s only a number I use for anonymity. Availability for interview. ‘When do you wish your course to start?’ As soon as possible. A handy US-style summer school where you can knock up some points. Only Lucy Cowell will never finish her thesis; never kneel down for her master’s hood to be draped around her shoulders. I pin the false evidence to the application form with a paper clip, fold the documents in three and put them into a self-sealing envelope I’ve already addressed, go down my iron and concrete staircase and open the door.

I stand there blinking like a bat that’s got up too early, struck a blow by the sunlight and the din and stink of the city. Astronauts must feel like this, stepping out of their space capsule after wheeling in silence through time above the earth, with the stars for company and the moon rising and setting its several cycles a day. The escalator carries me up into the station where I can do or buy everything I want or don’t, post my letter, get a Guardian and egg salad baguette in a paper sleeve for my lunch, queue for the cash point, pick up a bottle of wine, a pack of new floppies for the computer, drink a cup of cappuccino. The only thing I don’t do is buy a ticket and travel. Get away from it all. Instead I turn back, squirrelling away with my hoard to my silent lair. That’s enough of the world for now.

Living and working alone you become a hermit: Simeon Stylites on the top of his pillar in the desert; Diogenes in his tub, or follow the rule for anchoresses. ‘The nuns may keep no beast but a cat. They may make pleasing gestures from the window but not speak.’ You could say I chose this solitude out of pique.

After that first meeting my charmer let two days pass before she rang me on the internal phone. Just when I’d reconciled myself to her having been a bit pissed and saying things she either regretted or didn’t remember, alternating with wondering whether it would be totally uncool to ring her, there was her voice, slightly husky and posh, as I remembered it, saying, ‘So you do exist. I didn’t invent you. Was I going to call you or you me? I couldn’t remember what we’d said.’

‘I couldn’t either,’ I lied, feeling myself flush like Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of the dinner bell. Don’t be too laid-back, Jade, or she might ring off. ‘I think we said something about lunch but maybe you’re too busy lunching with clients.’

‘I’m sure I’ve got one free day. What about you? Do they let you out for a civilised eat sometimes?’

‘We could always say you wanted to brief me about something. That should be good for an extra hour.’

‘Actually you could do some research for me. I’ll speak to Drewpad. Would Tuesday suit?’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Do you have wheels? We could go out somewhere.’

‘Only two I’m afraid. ‘Then I added quickly in case she thought I was a pedal pusher, ‘A motor bike. You could cling on behind but that would be very undignified and you’d need the space suit.’

‘How exotic. Maybe when we know each other better. I’ll book a table at the Garden. It’s usually fairly empty at lunchtime. I’ll buzz you when I’m ready to leave.’

‘The bosses have blown for you.’ Drew had called me into his office. ‘Mrs Boss wants you to do some work for her. Have you got the time?’

‘I’d better find it, hadn’t I?’ I always joined in his conspiracy that we were both living out the last days of the Raj where the partners were concerned.

‘Anyway you’ll get a decent lunch out of it. Helen always lunches the juniors when they first arrive, to suss them out.’ This was to let me know that I wasn’t the first, so not to let it go to my head. ‘She asked if you were free on Tuesday. I said I’d ask you and let her know. I refuse to take umbrage at being used as a go-between.’

‘You should charge commission.’

‘Your lunch with the boss-lady is all fixed,’ he told me later when we were leaving the building together. ‘She’ll let you know when she’s ready to leave.’

‘My, we’re smart today,’ he said when I appeared on Tuesday morning.

‘Got to make a good impression on the Begum. She wouldn’t want to be seen with anything manky.’

That unmistakable voice called me at twelve-thirty. She would meet me in the foyer. My legs were trembling too much for the stairs. I took the lift, trying not to tweak my hair in its mirror wall.

She looked me up and down as I stepped out towards her, forcing a smile. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘We’ll take a taxi. Can you get one?’

We stepped out into Fetter Lane. I would find a cab or perish in the attempt. I would be efficient, authoritative. I lost the first to another lawyer, judging by his dark suit, but the next came along behind and I stepped off the pavement determined he should stop.

‘Where to?’

‘The Garden,’ I said as if I knew where it was.

‘Which one?’

‘Portugal Wharf,’ she said, her elegant high heels stepping up into the darkness of the cab. I caught a draught of her scent as I sank down beside her, careful not to let any part of our bodies connect by accident. I just hoped that when the time came I should be able to swallow whatever I’d chosen to try to eat, something I couldn’t choke on for preference. Careful, Jade, I was warning myself, don’t assume she knows, or that this is anything more than curiosity about a junior. After all she can’t have it off with them all, of both sexes. Or does she? I hadn’t been able to ask Drew without seeming to show an uncommon interest and losing my reputation for cool.

The Garden, Portugal Wharf, was an evening place, Helen explained, which was why it was quiet at lunchtime. You could sit out under a glass awning and look across the river where each passing pleasure boat set up a sparkling wash, to the green and silver ziggurats of new riverside apartments beached beside the Thames.

‘It was where the Portuguese wines came ashore,’ she said as we studied our menus with their riverine design of fishtailed Nereides and Tritons on sea horses blowing horns, ‘in this part of Vintry Ward. Most of the port houses were owned by the British, like Blandy’s you know.’

I didn’t know but wasn’t going to say so. I simply nodded in agreement.

‘I thought we should continue our association with water.’

Was I wrong or was she flirting with me? Had I been wrong before? Perhaps it was just her style. ‘Now what will you have? A starter? The goat’s cheese and rocket isn’t bad as that goes. Or the fritto misto.’

I opted for the insalata tricolore and a poached sea bass steak to follow. Helen took her own advice on the fritto misto and a filet mignon. ‘What would you like to drink?’

We agreed on a white wine as less likely to send us into an afternoon coma, and she ordered up a bottle of chablis and some fizzy water. ‘I refuse to be bound by those old ideas of red wine with red meat. Anyway white’s lighter at lunchtime. Convention is there to be broken, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t think I ever had any to break.’

‘A gypsy life?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You’re very lucky. No baggage.’

‘Oh, everyone has baggage, don’t they? Whole attics full of stuff you can’t look at but can’t throw out. A childhood, parents.’

‘Of course. But for some it doesn’t stay there, up in the attic. It comes downstairs and clutters up the living space. Conventions, other people’s expectations. Biology, gender, becoming a parent yourself.’

I thought of Roger and how easily he had managed to slide himself sideways out of all this, letting his wife take the strain for our family as well as her own. It was still easier for men to get someone else to carry the can and free them up. His example had made me hold out for independence. Even more so when he married and I saw Jenny falling into the role of wife, mother, carer, social secretary, writing the letters, keeping in touch, remembering birthdays, taking up the white woman’s burden.

‘So tell me the story of your life.’

‘Not much to it. School, Sussex Uni, in-house lawyer to a property company. Ate my dinners, took my Bar exams.’

‘I hadn’t realised you’re a barrister. Not just a pretty face. We must look after you. How much time have you spent in court?’

I had to admit to my court virginity. ‘We must see you lose it soon. I’ll suggest you go along with James next time he’s appearing, get the feel of it.’

‘I wouldn’t want to put Drew’s nose out. He’s been very kind and supportive.’

‘If you’re to get on you’ll have to get rid of that sort of sentiment. He’s an able solicitor but essentially an office boy. I have other things in mind for you. We need to see if you can perform. Forget all the stuff about truth and justice, that’s for the tabloids or Perry Mason. You need to be able to act like Olivier and interrogate like the KGB, while flattering the judge and jury. I’ll bet they didn’t teach you that at Sussex.’

Was I disappointed? My breath was taken away by her sophistication. The combination of power and control came off her like a flash of static, sexy, heady, a gush of irresistible energy that lit up her whole face as she held my gaze with the intensity of her own, iron drawn to a magnet, Amyntas’ lodestone.

‘Do you like music, real music not pop? James doesn’t. I miss a lot through having to go on my own which means I don’t go, of course. Do you?’

At that moment I would have sworn to enjoying baked toad if I’d been asked. ‘I’m better on early.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Mozart backwards.’

‘Not too many chanting monks and nuns or nannygoat-counter-tenors, I hope. I can always smell unwashed hair and damp stone.’

‘And then I pick up later. Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Britten.’

‘Strauss? There’s a good production of Der Rosenkavalier by Opera Bauhaus at Sadler’s Wells. I’ll tell my secretary to get us some tickets. She can ring you for some dates.’

Was my new lifestyle going to be all as whirlwind as this? I felt like young Kay in ‘The Snow Queen’, lifted up on wings above the earth. But there was no ice splinter in my heart, rather a glowing lump of charcoal that threatened to barbecue me from the inside. The wine was having an effect after only a couple of glasses, that and my heightened awareness of her every look and gesture. They would have made me drunk just on the deep gulps of San Pellegrino I was taking to try to stay sober. I was glad that at least the spotlight was off me and my past and the conversation had switched to music. I sensed that too much knowledge might make me less interesting to her. I couldn’t see Gateshead or Acton as high on her list of places to visit. She certainly wouldn’t have found my evening job now as a Chinese takeaway courier an amusing occupation.

It must be Amyntas who’s led me into this memorial maze but maybe that’s what I’ve needed to bring to the surface stuff that’s been lying below in the silt and murk, things I haven’t faced, that I was brought up to not to face, Mam and Dad belonging to the old school of so much best left unsaid and ‘what the head doesn’t know the heart doesn’t grieve over’ or ‘no good crying over spilt milk’, a horror of navel gazing or letting go.

Back in the office I was pretty useless for the rest of the afternoon. ‘Well?’ Drew asked as I sat down at my desk.

‘Hard to say really. She seems to want me to get some court experience, shadow the boss to learn how it’s done.’

‘He’s not Marcus Lately. You’d do better sitting in the public gallery.’

‘Can’t argue with the Begum. Theirs to command; ours to obey.’ I got out a file and tried to look busy.