Love and Sleep (44 page)

Doctor Dee said to him:

—There are some books the Lord Laski has sent. They are meant for you. He has written in them to you.

Kelley put his hand on them. Almost immediately Madimi was there with them. (They had seen her first among books; she read to them out of books; she was a book angel, somehow.) She patted a parchment cover; John Dee heard the sound of her hand.

—Mistress you are very welcome. In God for good as I hope. What cause of your coming now?

—
To see how you do.

Softly she said it, but not hesitantly, entering into the breach between the two friends. A sweetness entered with her.

—I know you see me often, John Dee said. But I see you only by faith and imagination.

—
That sight is perfecter than his.

The doctor could no longer maintain his careful calm. Kelley had come back to him, the child Madimi would not be lost to him. He knitted his fingers together and asked in tears:

—O Madimi shall I have any more of these grievous pangs.

—
Cursed wives and great devils are sore companions,
she said, as though it were an old saying, as a child will utter a maxim or a jest, having the form and the lilt of it but no meaning. Doctor Dee laughed, shook his head, dabbed at his eyes with his sleeve; laughed again.

Kelley had not laughed, had grown restless, clutching the chair's arms, his curtained eyes following Madimi (Dee supposed) as she went from place to place. He said:

—Madimi. Will you lend me a hundred pounds for a fortnight?

—
I have swept all my money out of doors.

Dee, sensing trouble, said softly that as for money, they would have what was necessary when God saw fit; but Madimi turned on the skryer.

—What dost thou hunt after? Speak, man. What dost thou hunt after?

He made no reply, drawing back as though the unseen child bent over him. He loved not God, she told him, not if he broke His commandments; see, his bragging words are confounded. Faith Hope Love, these are the greatest things, if he had not these, he had hate. Did he love silver? Did he love gold? The one is a thief, the other a murderer. Oh but he has a just God who loves him.

—
Come here,
she said to him.
Come.

Kelley started from the chair as though pulled by the ear, a bad boy. He was made to kneel before the stone of moleskin-colored crystal, still in its frame in the study, the first glass he had ever looked into, that glass that had first summoned Madimi (though he had not then known her), a fat babe with a glass in her hands.

—
Look and tell me if you know these.

He saw the dog-faced one, and fourteen others, herded together in the glass, like footpads and tavern haunters collected by the Queen's constables in a sweep of Cheapside. They knew him. He knew them. All their names began with B.

—
This is he who has followed thee for months,
she said. Venite Tenebrae spiritu meo.
Depart unto the last cry. Go you hither, go.

The wicked crew looked around themselves, alarmed and trapped: a wind seemed to be stirring their brown garments; they clutched one another, open-mouthed, goggling, writhing, but they were plucked up weightless as ashes and dispersed in a whirl. He had not heard one of them speak, not one: and he was glad of it.

He knelt for a long time looking into the empty glass, feeling the dreadful relief he felt after spewing, or releasing from his bowels a mass of sickness. He raised his eyes, blinking, finding himself in the same place he had been, but a different place. Where had he been, where had his soul journeyed? He saw in his mind a dark slow river, a book, a horse's eye.

—How is it with you? Doctor Dee whispered.

He swallowed. It was a time before he answered.

—Methinks I am lighter than I was. Empty. Returned from. From a great amazing.

He was trembling. He held up a hand to show Doctor Dee, and laughed to see it shake.

—
Thou art eased of a great burden,
said the angel-child with satisfaction.
Now love God. Love thy friends. Love thy wife.

John Dee had come to kneel beside him, and had begun a prayer of thanksgiving. He leadeth me beside the still waters, I shall not want, behold goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. He took Kelley's cold hand. They prayed together. They would not be parted.

She drove them out of England like geese before a goose-girl; she hurried them on across Christendom from Amsterdam to Bremen to Lübeck, though she would not tell them their final destination, nor what they were to accomplish. Then in Germany as winter came on she left them, without farewell, whether for good or not they could not know.

They still had congress with all the many others, great Gabriel and Galvah and Nalvage gowned like a king and Murifri in red like a yeoman, Il the merry player (
Jesu I had not thought to see you here,
he said to them out of the glass in Lübeck, as though it had been he traveling and not they). They had all followed the stone abroad, apparently, like bees following a dish of sugared fruits a housewife carries; and yet in Germany more and more often Kelley did not any longer need to look into the glass to see or speak to them, he met them at the top of the stair as he went down, heard them as he knelt at his prayers; he saw them from inn windows, signaling to him from the crowd in the street.

They brought news, sometimes, as pleased as gossips.

—
Your brother is clapped up in prison. How like you that? Your house-keeper I mean.

Nicholas Fromond, Jane Dee's brother: it must be he they meant. What had happened?

—
They examine him. They say thou hast hid divers secret things. As for thy books, thou mayst go look at them at leisure.

In horror Dee thought of his goods scattered, his books seized, he needed no glass in order to see them vividly. Why?

—
It may be that thy house will be burnt for a remembrance of thee, too. Well, if they do, so it is. I have given thee my counsel, and desired to do thee good. The choice is thine.

What choice? What choice had they now? He felt himself to be hurrying hopelessly toward his grave, his life burning down behind him.

Hurry, hurry. There was not much time now in which the two men must get their lessons, they were told, to learn the secret purposes for which they had been chosen, and cull the message which it was theirs to deliver to all states and peoples. And yet the saving message, the whole of the new truth whose vessels they had been chosen to be—it could only be given to them in the Enochian language: and therefore they must learn it.

But it was painfully, dreadfully hard. Tables had to be constructed, of forty-nine letters square; the angels gave them numbers, and the corresponding letters were then located; words were built of these, which they were told were angels’ calls, by which they could be summoned; only gradually did it become clear (to Doctor Dee, at least) that the angels who were summoned by the calls were themselves the words of the language, they had come full circle.

They talked of urgency, but they seemed not to conceive of it as mortals did; they had leisure to pause in the work to praise God at length, or prophesy, or to tell long strange stories for the two to ponder and allegorize, never sure that the meaning they arrived at and not some other might be meant. In Bremen, in Lübeck, in Emden, in the cramped bedrooms of inns and borrowed houses, Kelley and Dee set up their glass and their table (constructed now so it could be folded up on hinges, collapsed and carried) and took down further gibberish; late, late at night they waited on the angels while Rowland and Katherine and Arthur were rolled up with their mother asleep; Joanna Kelley in a chair watched with her fox's eyes her strange husband, and thought of her unthinkable fate.

Laski took them across Germany, leaving them on occasion to go wait upon some potentate, the Duke of Mecklenburg, the Bishop of Stettin, to shore up his fortunes. His star was sinking—the angels had stopped praising him—though he knew it not. He began to talk to them of gold: how it might be made easily now, with the spirits’ help; why could not the question be put to them, why. A magnate of Laski's stature could live for years on credit: for years, not forever.

Winter set in, early and very hard, but they pushed on, in wagons, coaches, and carts. Hurry, hurry. From Stettin to Posen (where they saw the tomb of the good king Wenceslaus) is two hundred miles, and on all of them the snow lay deep and crisp and even; the Duke hired twenty men to cut ice for two miles so their coaches could pass. Wide water-meadows, ice-locked now (little figures in the distance let down lines through the ice to catch fish), at last brought them to Lask in Poland. The Duke had been gone long. His people were not overjoyed to see him.

There by the enameled stove Kelley set up the table. And then Madimi returned, without greeting or apology,
a little wench in white
Kelley said, not at first recognizing her; she had grown.

—
I have been in England,
she said.
The queen is sorry she hath lost her philosopher. But the Lord Treasurer answered her, and said you would come home again shortly, begging to her. Truly none can turn the queen's heart from you.

An awful wave of homesickness washed the old man. The Queen. He saw the loved pockmarked face. O God.

—
I have been at your house too. All is well there. I could not come into your study there, for the queen has caused it to be sealed.

But had not Madimi said once to them that men's locks were no hindrance to her? Doctor Dee looked into the study in his mind, not knowing what hurt had been done to it. Silence and dust.

What house, then, would they have now? How were they to live? They have been advised to go to Cracow. How shall they fare there?

—
As wise as I am I cannot tell.

She seemed to grow dull and aimless in the foreign cold (it was their own brains, doubtless, gelid beneath their skullcaps and furs, their own contracting hearts). Kelley's breath clouded the cold stone into which he looked.

—
Sir Harry Sidney is dead,
Madimi said.
He was a secret enemy of yours.

She was nearly asleep. The three of them bent nearer the stove. John Dee felt tears rise to his eyes. He wrote down what Madimi had said, a secret enemy. He had always loved Harry Sidney, Philip's father. There was to be nothing left of his life, nothing to return to, he would die an old man in foreign parts.

(In Prague in August, after the English news at last caught up with him, he would write a note on this page:
Sir H. Sidney was not dead in February nor March, no not in May last. So this must be considered
.)

Cracow, royal city of Great Poland, piled up in the middle of a great flat plain flooded and muddy when they crossed it in March. Kelley and the women were silent seeing it at a distance, thinking Lord the world is huge: who would have thought great plains and cities went on coming into being one upon another to the farthest east. And all of Russia beyond. Doctor Dee, who had traveled widely, only groaned at his ague, and did not look up.

Once established in a tall house near the Cathedral, John Dee went to call on an old correspondent of his, Dr. Hannibal, a Capuchin monk, then coming to the end of his Commentaries on the
Pimander
of Hermes Trismegistus, many times longer than the AEgyptian book itself.

What did they talk of for hours? Jane Dee wondered, struggling with foreign coins and foreign foods. They talked of angels: of the nine choirs of the angels, who are not different from the Governors who Hermes says maintain the frame of the heavens and the distinctions and hierarchies that make things things and not mere chaos. Of the divisions in religion, when rash unlearned ungodly men by force and the sword impose their churches like beds of Procrustes on suffering men. How would it end? Dr. Hannibal turned the much-marked pages of his
Pimander
and read:

In that day not only will men neglect the worship of the gods, but—still more terrible—so-called laws will be enacted, which shall punish those who do worship them ... In that day will men, in boredom, give up thinking the world worth their reverence and adoration, this greatest of all goods, this All ... Then the earth will lose its balance, the sea no longer hold up ships, the heavens will not support the stars.

Was not that the state of the world now? Could not a case be made that their own age was likewise ending in disasters? Then the outcome was in God's hands, and Hermes foresaw that too:

...a coming back of all good things, a holy and awesome Restoration of the Whole Wide World imposed by the Will of God in the course of time.

Dr. Hannibal wondered—bending his round tonsured head close to Doctor Dee's white one and speaking in a low voice—if Christ's church was now falling in fragments because her age was past; and after a time of troubles would dawn a new age, the Age of the Holy Spirit, which would need no churches, no friars, no bishops, and each man would be priest to his neighbor.

—As Abbot Joachim of Flora preached, said Dee. So long ago.

—Who was condemned, said Dr. Hannibal. Let us speak no more of it.

Doctor Dee took Communion with the brave little round man at the church of the Bernardines, taking on his tongue the living God, glimpsing afterward the monk fumbling his spectacles from his face to wipe away tears (were they of joy? gratitude?). Kelley would not receive, though Dee urged him to, though even the angels spoke to him of the Bread in wonder and adoration:
The Flesh of God is all we know of meat, His Blood of drink; He may not refuse it to us. Did you think it was yours alone? We ate and drank before the foundation of the world. If a rich man gave to you to eat, would you not praise him? If he gave you the food of his plate, would you not praise him? Be content, be joyful, He has given you the whole Flesh of His Body.

Why did he refuse? Doctor Dee wanted to know. What holier preparation for the work they had now to do, what better.