DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (16 page)

Like a man with a maid. So that it was always his, John Dee’s, doing, not Kelley’s: his fault, if it was one.

—Come, he said, and slapped his knees, and rose. Come. We will ask. We will see.

There was a little tower room in the castle at T
ebo
where John Dee had set up the table of practice, where night after night
the spirits had come, drawn to the clear stone in the center, to speak to the two mortals. John Dee mounted the stairs toward
this room, tugging Edward Kelley after him by the sleeve of his gown. The afternoon entered in at the lancet windows of the
spiralling stair, the voices of those in the courtyards below.

—Up, said Doctor Dee. Up.

The pretty stone in its frame on the table was shot through with sunlight, smug (so it just now looked) and mum. On the table
lay John Dee’s papers, his record of all that was said here; his horn of ink, and the little cup of turned wood his son Rowland
had made for him to hold his pens.

He knelt before the stone. He drew Kelley down with him. They prayed together, as they always did, to be helped, to be kept
from harm, to be not drawn into temptation. When Kelley’s voice fell behind his, and his eyes narrowed as though with awful
weariness, John Dee ceased. Waited. Then:

—We will move the question, he said, taking his forehead in his hand, concerning the commandment given to Master Kelley, that
we
two have our wives in such sort as we might use them in common.

Kelley snored hugely just then, as he sometimes did when taken up by the spirits.

—Whether the sense were of carnal use, Dee said, contrary to law and the Commandment, or of spiritual love and charitable
care and and.

Kelley began to speak.

—A scroll, he said, and his hands made a soft gesture. Unrolling. On it words written.

Doctor Dee began to write down what Kelley said.

De utroque loquor
, said Kelley. Those are the words written. I spoke of both. John Dee wrote DE UTROQ: LOQUOR.

Oh terrible.
De utroque loquor
, I spoke of both. He put down his pen. Assist me O God. Assist me O Christ.

Terrible to know God’s command, but not His intentions; terrible that he must commit at the instructions of good angels what
he could not but believe a sin. Worst of all, though, was that he would now have to convince his wife of it: and he could
not even think how he might speak its name to her.

Jane Fromond had been just twenty-two when John Dee first saw her, a lady-in-waiting to Lady Howard of Effingham, wife of
the Lord Admiral who would years later sail against the Armada. It was the year of the comet that alarmed everyone, most especially
the great, whose birth and passing such ærial events foretell. A Swedish astronomer made a lucky guess, and said it foretold
the birth of a great Swedish prince, who would lay waste all Europe, and die in 1632: and Gustavus Adolphus was duly born,
red and squalling—he would carry off all of Rudolf’s and the Ro
mberks’ treasures from looted Prague to the snowy North. But
the noseless Dane Tycho de Brahe saw the same comet from his sorcerer’s castle on the island of Hveen, and proved it to be
not any exhalation of the lower air but an object far beyond the moon’s sphere—which made it the more unsettling: the changeless
heavens were giving birth to monsters.

John Dee, summoned to Elizabeth’s court to expound upon this blazing star, caught sight of Jane Fromond among the worried
nobility, bright-cheeked and smiling as she was always then, or so it seemed to him looking back from this far place. He was
then a man of fifty, white-bearded already, who had buried one wife; but she had come to know well the court and the men around
the Queen, and his honesty and good heart shone among them like the man with the lamp in the story he liked to tell. She was
a blazer herself—it was John Dee who said it to her—quick and hot especially when she saw injustice or indifference
to cruelty, which she did see often at Windsor and Richmond and Nonsuch; and if she was dismayed at her new swain’s great
age, she also thought she would rather have this frank grave man than any of the sprouts at court who did not know right from
wrong.

Which never until now had she doubted her goodman knew.

It took her so long to interpret what he told her, what he said the angels now required of them, that she could only stare
at him, her mouth open and her fingers fencing it.

Then she wept, he had not seen her weep so, not for her fear and her homesickness, no nor for her child born dead,
a full 1/4 of an Howre
he later wrote; he had not known she could weep so. Then she raged, even longer and more terribly; she damned Kelley and
the spirits in words he had not heard her use, and broke in fury a mirror that Duke Ro
mberk had given her. The younger children,
forbidden the room, crept back weeping too, not knowing at what and shouting at their father to stop, stop. He sent them away
and turned to beg his wife to possess herself.

—Stop, stop, he said, trying to gather her battling arms to his. She went to her knees suddenly with a cry as though shot,
and flung her arms around him.

—Husband I beg you do not leave me. Never. Never never.

He could not raise her, could not comfort her. No Jane no. Almost he withdrew what he asked of her; he thought of Abraham
with the knife at Isaac’s throat, he longed to hear an angel voice call his name, to tell him the test was passed. No one
called to him.

All that night there were comings and goings and meetings and partings in the wing of the castle they and Kelley and his wife
all shared, lights in the common rooms and halls, doors slammed, voices raised. Jane and Joanna locked themselves in Kelley’s
room and left the men to pace back and forth outside, their eyes not meeting.

Why did they want this of them, John Dee wondered, was it not enough that they be squeezed like a lemon of all unwillingness,
he would go as far as they desired but why must they stretch out their hand to touch his wife, his and Kelley’s poor doe of
a girl, trembling as though the dogs were at her? Was it that alone, only a further proof of his constancy, were they like
jealous lovers, never convinced: or was Kelley right, that they two were to be crossed in this way as roses or apricots are
crossed, to bring forth new fruit?

Calm and dry-eyed, holding Joanna’s hand, Jane came forth. There was a sudden odor in the air, withdrawn as soon as sensed,
none of them could agree later what to name it, new-mown grass said Joanna, Persian attar said Kelley. They two had prayed,
Jane said, and vowed a vow.

—You must ask them again, Joanna said. You must.

—We, Jane said, will in no wise agree to this except we are certain they have said what you have told us. Who never before
said such things but often comforted us. And we will eat no flesh nor fish till this be answered.

—Jane.

—And I trust, she said (said it strongly, though she seemed close to tears again), that God will turn me to stone before he
will suffer me in my obedience to receive any shame or inconvenience.

—Yes, her husband said. Agreed. Now let us to bed. Before the sun is up.

They signed a solemn pact, all four of them, it still exists, written on strong parchment that time has darkened but not harmed,
in ink made of lampblack and wax more lasting than blood. They swore secrecy on pain of death; they vowed they would tread
underfoot all human doubts that power and authority over sins—their releasing and discharging—are from God. They vowed to
keep between them Christian charity, spiritual friendship, and (this written as firmly and clearly, a little larger too) matrimonial
liberty. And they spread the document on the holy south table in the chapel of the castle, like a letter to Santa, and waited
to be answered.

No countermand came. May crept along, the days lengthening.

In their curtained bed, awake in the midnight, John and Jane spoke for the first time since they had put their hands to it.

—They have honored us, he said. And brought us honor.

—They have, said Jane. And I would they had left me unhonored, and suffered me to stay in my own kitchen, and my kitchen-garden.

—Ah, Jane.

—The peasecods are fat now on the vines there. And strawberries.

—We have no such strawberries as are grown here, in T
ebo
.