Love and Sleep (27 page)
—There is no plot, he said.
There was a plot. There was always a plot, the same plot, it only thickened now and then into action as men's plans and their courage hardened. It was a plot to invite Catholic troops into the country to remove the heretic Queen of England from the throne and seat there instead her cousin, Mary, formerly Queen of France and now Queen of Scotland, a Catholic whatever else she might be, and for some time now Elizabeth's prisoner.
Bernardino de Mendoza, Ambassador of the Most Catholic King of Spain; Cardinal William Allen, the exiled Englishman at the Papal court in Rome; the Pope, Sixtus V, who had forbidden Catholics to obey their heretic Queen; the Duke of Guise and the burning hearts of the Catholic League in France—this current mutation of the plot involved them all. Firm plans were being laid, numbers of troops and their dispositions and embarkation points, the names of those marked for seizure and death.
The French Ambassador had not been told of it. He was firmly Catholic, and Protestant enthusiasm frightened and disgusted him; but he had seen St. Bartholomew's Night in Paris, Protestants slain on his doorstep by Catholic fanatics, the gutters flowing with blood, and it had darkened his spirit for good. He was not reliable; too soft, too
politique,
to be entrusted with the details of a plot to murder Elizabeth and forcibly reconvert her realm to the True Faith. He didn't know that his house was used as a meeting-place, and that certain English gentlemen who took refuge in his garden, who heard Mass with him in his chapel (the English could not forbid it there), were deeply concerned in the plot.
He wrote often in cipher to Mary, in her imprisonment in Sheffield, cheering her with news of his negotiations for her release and return to her own realm of Scotland, transmitting news from her brother-in-law the King of France, sending money and jewels from devoted liegemen in England and France. He didn't know that his letters were intercepted and read before they were sent on, not always unchanged.
He didn't know that his personal secretary (a Frenchman with money troubles named Courcelles) was in the pay of Walsingham and the English, and communicated to them whatever he saw and heard and read in the Ambassador's house and papers; or that his chaplain, who said his Masses, who consecrated the Bread and placed it on the Ambassador's tongue, was also an agent of the English, and told all that he saw, all that he heard, even in the darkness of the confessional.
On the 29th, this priest wrote to Elizabeth's chief of spies, Sir Francis Walsingham: “Monsieur Throckmorton dined this night at the ambassador's house. A Catholic. He recently conveyed 1500
ecus sol
to the Queen of Scots, on the Ambassador's account ... At midnight the Ambassador was visited by Milord Henry Howard, a Roman Catholic and a Papist,” who entered privily through the garden, and awakened the Ambassador with a handful of sand thrown against his window, to talk to him about saving a Scots Catholic who was staying in the house from being imprisoned; with such tasks the Ambassador was trusted.
The Italian
gentiluomo servante
was not mentioned in anyone's dispatches anywhere; no one attempted to recruit him. He talked too much and too loudly. The chaplain in particular avoided him: when he felt Bruno's potent attention turned on him, he made excuses, vanished, hid in his little vestry and sweated, running through in his mind every move he had made that day, looking for the slip Bruno might have noticed. But Bruno's stare was only a fascinated repulsion, frank appreciation of a specimen. For Giordano Bruno had, himself, been an Italian monk; his fingers were still consecrated, nothing could wash the chrism from them; and he knew a bad priest when he smelled one.
—You suffer fools gladly, Bruno would say to the Ambassador, late, late in the Ambassador's private chamber. I would not. I cannot.
And the Ambassador's narrow ascetic face would smile a little.
—You are a philosopher, he said. You see farther. Perhaps. These troubles are as nothing
sub specie AEternitatis.
And yet we are flesh and blood, we are here, and the work is ours to do now. Let us talk now of the reception at court for the Prince of Laski...
So John Florio would pick up his pen, and Bruno would lace his fingers before him, a sarcastic smirk on his face, we will play this game if we must. There were few men the Nolan had loved as fully as his huge heart was capable of loving: the Seigneur de Mauvissiere was one of them. So he would give him now the order of the guests arriving for the reception, and the nature of the compliments given, the asides made and the faces of those who made the asides, the winners at the games and the prizes awarded them, the unspoken currents of fear, malice, unawareness, and suspicion that held all of them together like a purse-seine.
The French Ambassador did not understand how Bruno was able to do what he did; but Alexander Dicson knew. For he had read (as the Ambassador had not, to whom it was dedicated) Bruno's book on memory.
The way to remember things is to establish irremovably within your intellect a series of places, like the parts of a large building—the arches, the windows, passages, stairs, pillars, galleries and even the gardens and barns. You may commit to memory the parts of a real edifice, or you may invent a more spacious and complex one of your own. Onto the places or parts (
subjecti
) you put images (
adjecti
) of the things to be remembered, in the order in which you wish to remember them. The images are to be cast in such a way as to excite the feelings, for things that are striking or beautiful or disgusting are more easily remembered than things that are bland and uninteresting.
Very well; Dicson practiced this, using the few spaces and partitions of his room at the Ox and Pearl, and it seemed to do what was promised. Then the way grew harder.
When your memory places have all been filled with interesting and important matter that you do not wish to evict, more places can be added; on your travels collect new places, attach them with simple bridges or portals to the earlier places; or contain the old places within squares or streets of new ones. Your memory grows, and nothing is lost.
Was it possible, Dicson wondered, to use the art of memory to retain and recall the rules of the art of memory? To build houses and construct images to remind of the rules for building houses and constructing images? He had not yet even reached the Seals themselves. He got out paper and ink, to make notes, and put them away again.
The first Seal is the Field: the Field is memory itself, which is not different from the
vis imaginativa,
the power of imagination. Look out upon this Field, its many many folds and convolutions; for though it seems plain and patent we know how many hidden places it contains. In those places are the ten thousand, the virtually infinite number of things my eyes and ears and other senses have put there since I was a boy, every scene of childhood, every noble or foolish person, every dog, star, stone, rose. It is the chaos of Anaximander. I know what things are contained there but I cannot grasp any, or if I do I cannot tell what I will come away with, jewel, dog-turd, something useful, something I do not need. How will I bring order to infinite memory?
The second seal is the Chain. Dicson began to understand. All things, whether we perceive it immediately or do not, are linked, lower to higher, preceding to following, first to next to next. Aries acts on Taurus, Taurus on Gemini, Gemini on Cancer: the Zodiac is a chain; each of its links is made of smaller chains,
ad infinitum
. Everything has its place. Thus also is memory ordered.
Dicson slit the pages with his knife as he devoured bread and cheese and the text. Cut bread, cut a page. The Seals now grew more difficult.
The Peregrinator, who walks through the different chambers of the memory house, gathering what he needs from what was stored for other reasons. The Table, where twenty-three people sit, whose names begin with the letters of the alphabet. It only slowly dawned on Dicson that he was to remember individual words by means of these people, who were to change places with great rapidity, spelling out words in his mind as his tongue formed them. But the seal called the Century employed not twenty-three but one hundred boys and girls (they should be young, attractive, friends of yours, Bruno said, faces well known to you; Dicson doubted he knew a hundred people's faces), and they were to stand in the places of memory, ready to carry emblems, play parts, a laughing helpful cohort at your service always. Always. For some reason tears rose to Dicson's eyes.
There was the Garden of Circe, where the four elements mutated and changed through seven houses belonging to the planets, generating as they went not only all species of animals and plants but all the human types that resembled or shared the nature of those animals, the hot-dry sun-loving Lion, his yellow Dandelion, his planet Sol, the King whose nature and face is like his. The elemental flux of Anaximander took shape and order in the memory-artist's mind.
All things proceed from lower to higher, and beginning with the lowest we may proceed to the highest. Dicson on the stair midway to the top dared not look down; he felt with his foot for the next stair, arms out like a blind man. The twenty-second Seal was the Fountain and the Mirror. The mirror reflects the fountain: the bounty of eternity gushes forth unceasing, an uncountable tumble of this and that, but the mirror, Mind, contains every droplet exactly as it is produced. Why are we troubled, why are we confused? There is but one Knowledge, placed in one Subject.
Unable to read more than a few pages together before he had to rise, giddy and overcome; finally unable to take in more than a page, a subsection, a paragraph, before lifting his surfeited eyes, Dicson approached the Seal of Seals.
He had not waited on his patron Sir Philip for several days, had not prosecuted his family's business at court. He thought sometimes that he had fallen into the hands of one of those proud teachers who expound what they are able to do, not in order to permit you to do it too, but only to awaken your wonder, and make you certain you could never, never. Bruno alluded in these pages to other tracts he had also written, other forms of the Art of Memory he knew, systems other than this one of seals and a field: and if Alexander Dicson read his crabbed and unpleasant Latin aright, the man claimed that from them he had built for himself other artificial memories containing hundreds of thousands of items, and that he used all of them interchangeably, simultaneously, or in combination one with another.
Weary with reading what he could only partly grasp, Alexander Dicson took the round glasses that were little help to him from his nose and put them aside. When he pinched out his tallow candle, his small dark window brightened a little, and Dicson went to it. He watched candles put out in other windows, one there, one there: other late scholars, or lovers maybe.
For it was moonless midnight now, most of the stars covered up in clouds; London's lights were dim, a string of torches flaring at water-stairs, candles in windows, linkboys hurrying before belated gentlemen; and the lightless river sundering her, the river running past Dicson's window, past Salisbury Court too, and past the great houses along the Strand toward Westminster.
At that hour, not far up the river, in a room in a house in the village of Mortlake, two men knelt before a transparent globe mounted in the center of a painted table; and though candles lit the room, the globe was lit from within as well, and shone into the faces of the two who looked in. What did they see? John Dee saw nothing but the limitless depths of the stone's transparency; the other man, Edward Kelley, saw the angel Uriel.
They asked the angel: What did the vision mean, that had visited Kelley at dinner, unlooked for, sudden, of the sea, and ships covering it; and the beheading of a woman by a tall man in black?
Uriel answered. The voice he used was Kelley's, almost too soft sometimes to be heard, the voice of a man awaking from a dream or falling into one; and John Dee wrote down all that he said:
The one did signifie the provision of forrayn powers against the welfare of this land; which they shall shortly put into practice. The other, the death of the Queene of Scotts.
—The Queen of Scots, said Dee, looking down at what he had written.
—
It is not long unto it,
whispered Uriel or Kelley. And John Dee wrote:
It is not long unto it.
On Midsummer Day Doctor John Dee walked out on Mortlake field all the morning.
Beltaine
the season was called among the Welsh race from which he sprang: the other, the better half of the year. Last night on Richmond Hill with his neighbors he had made his Midsummer bonfire, the good old custom that the Puritans so much hated; there had been no trouble this year, and the Queen, who was at Richmond, had sent him a cask of Canary wine to make merry. Today there were small clouds solid and ovoid like young sheep treading the sky, summer clouds, and a sun hot and young too.
With the skirts of his long coat tucked up and his hose wet to the shins, Doctor Dee with his basket went along the brook's side, gathering this and that which he saw growing along the rushy banks. Cows stepped in and out of the stream and bent to drink, or raised their lashy eyes and swung their great calm heads toward him. There was mint here, of two kinds, for teas and comfits; some myrtle for a posy, Venus's flower, for his wife. There was comfrey, every part of it useful, root branch leaf and pale flower that the bees loved. Doctor Dee crushed mint leaves before his nose, and inhaled the summer.
He did not need to go on this walk, there were simples for sale, the woman who lived by the stile would give him all he needed for the gift of his visit to her, and she knew more of them than he. But it pleased him to gather. He thought that Galen must once have gathered: for to see those herbs that out of His bounty God through His sun's influence brought forth for man's ease and health, to see them not in jars and baskets or distilled in apothecary's liquors but unfolding in their time from earth, to know them by their leaves and colors—that made a man wise, made a doctor a good man: Doctor Dee felt that, though he might not have argued it. So—his head full of sunshine, and his eyes quartering the ground—he went around Mortlake field, humming softly and tunelessly like the bees.