As if Berridge had suddenly turned to a serpent in his hands, Arthur stepped back, his eyes widening, his breath seizing. “But you are not—you are not a boy,” he stammered.
Naked from the waist up, the person in front of him was a woman. A beautiful woman with long red hair. “Would your father have taught me in this shape?” she charged.
Arthur’s mouth opened and closed. “And rowland—?”
“Has known almost since the beginning,” she said.
He blinked, still trying to process her transformation, and she stepped close and took his hand in hers. With a smile, she slid his hand up to her breast.
Suddenly all the longing that he had bottled up inside, twisted and questioned and tried to press out of himself for over a year, tumbled forth. An instant later, his arms locked around her, and she let him pull her down onto the cloak spread over the floor, where they mounted one another with a wild, rutting urgency.
Some time later, she lay atop him, her head in the small of his shoulder as the dark explosion of climax drained away. Hearing a sound, he opened his eyes to see an old man he did not know lunging at them, a knife in his hands. Arthur rolled, flinging Berridge—or whoever she was—away.
Stumbling with the force of his drive, the other man ran past them but turned quickly, leaping at them again.
How the knife—the one she’d cut him with, still marked with his blood, and with strange characters running down the blade—came into Arthur’s hand, he didn’t know. And what happened next happened so quickly that he could never quite remember it: As their attacker darted around him, clearly headed for her, Arthur’s hand flicked out and slit his throat.
The other man dropped to the floor, blood welling and spurting into pools on the flagstone. Arthur heard the knife clatter to the floor as well and stood staring at his hand in horror.
Moments later, the Berridge who was not a boy propelled him out the door, saying he must save himself and that she would clean up as necessary. And she’d added a strange request: Send Mr. Shakespeare.
January 1607
Castle Bruiach, Scotland
Well-wrapped in furs on a still and moonless night, she sat alone in an open window high in a tower, staring down at the dark ice of the loch. Once, her mother had ruled this castle. Just that morning, however, after a quick but decisive seduction of the young lord who now had charge of it, she had become the new lady of the lake. The way she sat, one hand resting protectively on her still-flat belly, might have made her new husband proud, thinking he had tilled his new field well. Inside her, though, another man’s child was already growing, a fact she had not found fit to share with her new lord.
The night before, in a sudden bitter cold, the loch had frozen, its surface smooth as black glass. Still uncluttered by snow or the tramping of men, it glimmered faintly in the starlight. Letting her breathing slow and her body relax, she stared at its surface without really seeing it, and after a while, pictures began to form in her mind. At first, they were memories, though she saw the scenes with a detached clarity, not, as she’d first seen them, from within her body, but floating somewhere overhead.
She had always looked young and boyish, so it was easy to bind her breasts and dress like a boy five years younger than her true age. She had refused, however, to cut the bright hair that had always seemed, somehow, to be an extension of her soul, some part of herself more intrinsic than other, less unique features. So she acquired a wig and a large cap, and she experimented with various substances until she found one that could slick her long hair down inside them. And then she traveled south all the way to London.
West of London, to be exact. To a place called Mortlake. From a boiling lake, she thought with dark satisfaction, to a lake of the dead. There, she presented herself to the English wizard Dr. Dee, in order to steal the learning out of which he had cheated her mother.
Her mother had been dead for nearly a decade, but the girl had forgiven neither the wizard nor the thief for their part in making her mother’s life a disappointment. Though she had met neither man, the whole of her young life had been one long exercise in reviling them. Neither man, in fact, had any reason to know of her existence, though the thief, Mr. Shakespeare, had been present—as an illicit observer—at the hour of her making. During a Great rite, her mother had told her, at the top of Dunsinnan Hill, in the light of a Samhuinn fire. Later that night, he had stolen away the mirror and the manuscript whose loss had made her mother howl at the moon. She had been born, the girl sometimes thought, with the express purpose of retrieving those two lost treasures. She had gone to London to hold true to that purpose.
Dr. Dee sensed her power at once and took her in. He had been in the dark, when it came to the spirit world, since his last scryer of real talent, Edward Kelley, had got himself killed in Bohemia. So he welcomed this new boy, Hal Berridge, with open arms and trembling delight, giving thanks to a gracious heaven. In the guise of a boy, she toiled for him dutifully, and he repaid her efforts, unveiling, layer by layer, all the deep learning of his long life. More than her mother could ever have dreamed.
She spent all her spare hours in the maze of his library in that rambling set of conjoined cottages on the banks of the Thames. It took her almost a year to find her mother’s manuscript in his most closely guarded hiding place, behind the movable stone in the fireplace of his innermost study. She could not read the original, but she could and did read the translation, making her own copy sentence by sentence in the moments she could finagle alone with it. By the time she finished, she had engraved its tales of the goddess Corra—also called Cerridwen, Dee had noted—and her rites, word for word, into her memory.
It would not, however, be enough. For always, Dr. Dee taught her, learned magi left some crucial detail out of their written records of magical rites, lest they fall into the hands of the uninitiated. It was why apprenticeship was so essential and why Dee’s refusal to teach her mother had rankled so.
Dr. Dee as good as told her that he’d remained silent on some key aspect of what she sought: the deed without a name. In all probability, the writer of the original manuscript had done the same. If she meant, as she did, to reenact the rite whose secrets had gone to the grave with her mother, then she would have to milk that knowledge from a witness. And she knew the identity of only one.
A man who had stolen, according to her mother, not only the mirror and the manuscript, but also something more precious: a thunderbolt from the gods. The first two she intended to take back. The third she intended to avenge.
And then vengeance landed in her lap. First, in the face of a redheaded woman she had seen in the mirror. The face of a woman with a knife. Dr. Dee, she knew, suspected that it was the face of her mother. It was not, but it was useful, nevertheless, in a way she had not dreamed. It took her, willy-nilly, to court, where she found herself lodged in Hampton Court Palace.
And then, in a strange chain of events, it had prompted the misshapen earl of Salisbury to call for a play from Mr. Shakespeare. An early draft had been sent out to Mortlake, which had brought the old wizard back to court in a quavering rage. At first, when she’d realized that it shadowed her mother, she’d thought she had yet another reason to wreak revenge on Mr. Shakespeare. And then she’d realized that it also conjured up something else: the memory she had been seeking, of a rite seen long ago on a hill in Scotland. A deed without a name. A deed Mr. Shakespeare had remembered, it seemed, without the guile of a wizard, recording it in full.
After that, she laid her plans well. The suggestion that she might be given a role in the play came from her, though it reached Salisbury’s ears through a circuitous route. The play was to be offered before the king amid the celebrations around the anniversary of the Powder Plot. The Samhuinn moon fell just before the appointed day, and she chose that night for her revenge.
She’d found the empty wing of the palace and chosen the room with care, arranging an assignation there with rowland Dee. Some time before, she’d gone fis
hing for Mr. Shakespeare’s eyes; feeling them fall upon her, she’d done her best to keep them there. She’d sent a message to him, as well, begging his company.
And then she’d seen what she’d seen in that mirror, the moment it passed her by in that last rehearsal.
Dressed in her queen’s costume, her real hair cascading around her in coppery waves, she left the rehearsal in the Great Hall, heading back to the buttery that served as a greenroom. She knew exactly where they kept the mirror in its chest. It was the work of a moment to pick the lock and take it, and then to slip back out, unseen by the rest of the company, who were riveted by Burbage in full-blown rant.
She made her way through the palace’s web of corridors to the old deserted wing, but from there her deep-laid plans went awry. First, Arthur Dee had appeared instead of rowland. And then the old man who’d been tailing her had died instead of Mr. Shakespeare.
She’d sent Arthur quickly away, telling him to send the playwright back.
As soon as he was in the corridor, she latched the door behind him and set about the work she needed to do. She had just drawn the blue gown over the body, stripped naked and bound, when she heard a tap at the door.
Mr. Shakespeare, at last. “You are late,” she said as he took in the form of the body draped in blue on the floor. “That was meant to be you.”
He looked up with horrified eyes. “And if I cry murder?”
She held his eyes coolly. “They will arrest the killer. Arthur Dee.”
He would not consign his old master’s eldest son to the executioner, and they both knew it.
She had quoted his words to his face, enjoying it: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”
As Arthur had recently done with her, she now enjoyed watching him realize who she was. “The Lernaean Hydra,” he murmured. “Lady Elizabeth Stewart’s child.”
In exchange for her silence and her disappearance, they agreed upon a trade: He had brought, as requested, a folded wad of pages excised from the first version of his new play—a version that he said was now obsolete after he’d spent the last few hours revising.
He insisted, however, that she leave behind the mirror. She looked at it, briefly, with regret, for it was beautiful, and a thing of power. But she did not need it. There would be another, more powerful, where she was going. So she opened her fingers and let the dark circle drop; it rolled into the folds of the blue gown.
After that, they had both exited through a high window, leaving the door latched behind them. The way he had come, he thought, was being watched. In the garden below, they parted. She turned one last time before fading into the dark, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. The queen, my lord, is dead. And I shall be queen hereafter.
In the tower window, the memories went dark. And then another picture arose, not a memory, though whether it belonged to past or future, she could not tell: the face of a redheaded woman with a knife.
And in the background, the tower in which she sat, in flames.
EPILOGUE
THE FOLLO WING DAY, the remains of a body, blackened beyond recognition, were pulled from the smoking ruins of the castle. It proved to be Ian Blackburn. Though a police forensic team searched the ruins with a fine sieve, no trace of Carrie Douglas was ever found.
Their followers at Castle Bruiach were charged with the Scottish version of accessory murder in the death of Lucas Porter. A lot about Auld Callie’s, Sybilla’s, and Eircheard’s deaths, however, would never be explained, because everyone who knew the details was either missing or dead.
At the hospital, they told me I’d recently had a pretty serious concussion. It explained my amnesia on the hilltop, along with the headache and sluggishness I’d wakened with. But not, I fretted, what I’d done. Or hadn’t.
It was Lucas’s flash drive, in the end, that did that. He’d documented, in cold detail, three murders. On a sullen gray afternoon at police headquarters in Perth, DI Sheena McGregor summoned Lady Nairn, Ben, and me to view the film if we wished. “Wish” seemed a very odd choice of words; I would not wish that sight on anyone. But I needed to see with my waking eyes what I had done, or not done. So I sat with my hands tightly clasped in my lap, watching myself dip in and out of consciousness in the background as Carrie held Sybilla down and Ian raised the ritual blade. The cry from Sybilla as it struck was hair-raising even on a small screen. At the moment of its happening, it had roused me from my stupor. I’d stumbled to Sybilla’s side as if drunk, trying to stop the blood, to pour it back into her body with my hands. As Carrie laughed, Ian had backhanded me so that I spun away, sliding once more to the ground, unconscious.
That was all I needed to see. I walked out of the room before the camera pulled away from me. I could not bear to see Ben either looking at me, his face a careful blank, or looking studiously away. And I had no wish to watch Eircheard die.
There are some things that, once known, cannot be un-known. Cannot be forgotten or erased.
I walked out of the building to find Lily sitting on a bench outside the door. She looked pale and very young, her face pinched with grief inside the bright halo of her hair.
“It’s my fault,” she said, swallowing back tears. “It’s all my fault.”
I sat down beside her. “You’re not responsible for what Carrie and Ian did, Lily.”
“I thought he was brilliant. I thought he was cool. I thought he liked me. I’m an idiot,” she wailed.
“He used you, sweetheart. So did Carrie.”
“I went along with him,” she said, her voice ragged with self-loathing. “I lied to you: It was me on the hill, that first day you were at Dunsinnan. I thought we were rehearsing a secret initiation rite. And I was with Ian the next morning, after they killed Auld Callie. I didn’t know, but I should have. And then I went with him, after the fire festival. I thought it was a lark. And they almost killed you. And Eircheard—Eircheard is dead.” She bit her lip, looking away as her voice dropped to a whisper. “I miss him.”
“So do I.”
“I’m sorry.” Her face crumpled and sobs racked her. I put my arm around her and let her cry. She’d been naïve, not evil, but she would have a hard time forgiving herself. It was one of the worst sins of evil, I reflected. Twisting naïveté and innocence to its own use.
Holding Lily, I sat lost in my own thoughts. That she’d been on the hill explained part of what I’d seen, but not everything; the image of her neck thickly smeared with blood was still vivid in my mind. Surely what I’d seen had been half dream, twining around reality, twisting its shape.
It took time to sort out everything we’d found, and some things that we’d lost.
The manuscript we’d found at fonthill had vanished in the flames at Loch Bruiach. What little I’d heard about it came from Carrie and Lucas. Tantalizing as their hints had been, I could not trust a word of it—even, at times, the basic identification of a letter by John Dee, presumably to Shakespeare, and a manuscript of Macbeth. No one else would likely want to trust even the fact of the finding. I knew the sort of media storm that Shakespeare manuscripts stirred up. It was easier to wonder about what I’d nearly seen—and rue its passing—in quiet and let others blather publicly about just what Catherine forrest may have found.
The mirror proved to be Dee’s and went back to the British Museum—its exact fit into the groove in the floor of Castle Bruiach was noted, though no one knew quite what to do with that information. Marks on the side were consistent with the lettering identified by Arthur Dee—but they were also consistent, noted the lab, with random lettering.
It went on rotating display, half the year in the Enlightenment Gallery, half the year in the Mexican room, attached to a statue of Tezcatlipoca at the foot. Museum staff noted that every once in a while, in either place, someone would be found in front of it, shaking in terror, claiming to have seen visions of blood and fire. The guards avoided looking at it.
Lady Nairn’s mirror was found in a ritual room deep
inside the maze at Joanna Black Books, surrounded by black and purple candles, half burned away. Nearby lay a knife with traces of Auld Callie’s blood. The only prints on the handle were Joanna’s. Or Carrie’s, I should say.
The loch, which had so easily cast me back out, kept close and secret hold of the knife from the hill, which remains unrecovered.
The owner of Her Majesty’s Theatre was discreetly informed of the cache of magical books in the dome room; what he did with most of them remained still more discreet. Dee’s book with Arthur’s letter inside, however, he donated to the British Library, where scholars began to squawk over just what the phrase “one of my father’s scholars” implied. No one was as certain as Joanna had been that the diagrams had anything to do with the Globe.
Aubrey’s diary went to join the bulk of his papers at Oxford university’s Bodleian Library, on permanent loan from Lady Nairn.
Plans for a private production of Macbeth using objects from her collection were scrapped. Instead, Lady Nairn opted for the first public exhibition of the Nairn collection, to open at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh, later traveling down to the British Museum. As part of it, she decided to include screenings of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s lost film of Macbeth.
She still wanted a production of the play to run in tandem with the exhibition, but thankfully she did not ask me to direct it. Instead, she asked me to direct as its counterpart, light balancing darkness, the comedy that told another story of witchcraft: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To that, I happily said yes.
Both Carrie and Ian died intestate; under Scottish law, this made Lady Nairn the sole heir of them both, as aunt and “sibling of a grandparent,” respectively. So Lady Nairn found herself in possession of a Covent Garden bookshop and a fine collection of rare occult esoterica, including a black, staring cat named Lilith and an unimpressed snake named Medea, as well as the royalties of Corra ravensbrook’s book, which became an instant bestseller when news of the murders broke.