Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  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.

  TWO

  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.

  Here was vervain, the shy lilac flowers upon her flimsy stalks. When you pick her—so the old woman said—if she will do good, you must pray thus, Hail be thou, holy herb, growing on the ground; th’art good for many a sore, that healed Christ and stanched his wound; in the name of sweet Jesus, I take thee from the ground.

  And there, he had said the prayer in his remembering of her saying it, though he knew that the healing virtues of the herb were present in it naturally, and did not depend on her charm. Here were primroses, the sun’s flower: keep them by you, wear gold, take the blue air, and you draw the sun into a sad Saturnian horoscope. Doctor Dee dug them for Kelley. He wrapped their roots in a spill of damp paper, and put them in his basket. Kelley’s melancholy required stronger medicine, and yet these pretty blooms in his window need not be despised.

  John Dee looked up at the brilliant sky, wherein strange fires writhed, such as can be seen by the eye when it is raised suddenly from darkness.

  He thought sometimes—not often—that perhaps he had been happier before Edward Kelley had come knocking on his door: and when he thought so his heart would contract with horror, as though the thought might have power to drive the young man away from the door on that long-past night: and Doctor Dee could not now do without him.

  When he first came to Dee’s Mortlake house, a year and three months ago now, a March night full of wind, Kelley had brought a book for Doctor Dee to interpret for him, a book in a code that Dee could not break, a language he could not translate. (It lay in the house still, in Master Kelley’s room, beneath his pillow, from where it whispered to Kelley in his dreams.) Doctor Dee, alert as he always was for the rare sensitive soul able to look into an empty crystal sphere or empty mirror of black obsidian (or into a dish of plain water or a bead of glass) and catch faces and voices in it, had invited Master Kelley to sit before such a sphere, one that Dee had reason to believe had spirits answering to it; and the man had seen them, and heard them too. Since that night Doctor Dee had filled books with the conversations they had had, Kelley and the angels, celestial playbooks, act upon act. Doctor Dee had been greatly blessed, and so had Edward Kelley; the difference was that John Dee knew it, and praised God daily for it, and Edward Kelley did not seem to know it.

  His name had not been Kelley then. His name had been Talbot. He had gone on being Talbot for some months, until on a winter day his brother had appeared at the door, and his name was Kelley: an evil-minded boy whose eye shifted continuously from corner to corner, looking (said Doctor Dee’s wife) for something he could steal. This brother saw that Edward Talbot had got a good place, and some power over the house, and would have liked to share it, but Doctor Dee sent him away: not before the man (despite Edward’s shriekings to silence him) had told all.

  So Edward Talbot, Kelley, was not a learned man, nor had he a degree from Oxford as he had said; he had not journeyed in Wales but had hid in his brother’s house from the magistrate’s constable who sought him. He had told abominable lies, then, and seemed even now to feel no remorse; shame, perhaps, and sorrow that he had caused sorrow, but not remorse, or much embarrassment. As though to him a past were only a selection out of all possible tales, which might have changed when he next looked into it.

  Knowing the truth (the coining, the ears cropped by the common hangman for wicked sorcery, which crime he still denied) had only confirmed Jane Dee’s fear and dislike of Kelley. The next row had been hers with him, with much said that would be hard to unsay, much banging of doors and packing of bags. I will not stay in a house where I am not wanted. Where I am hated. I
will be gone away this night. Take your hand from my coat. See to your wife.

  Up the stairs to try Jane’s locked door, behind which she wept, and down again to see that Kelley had not hurried away so fast as he had seemed ready to: still packing his bag, a gift of Dee’s, with books of Dee’s. He was a cumber to the house, he said, he dwelt here as a prisoner, he were better far to be away in the country where he could walk abroad and not be troubled with slanderous tongues. No more of the farthest room, no more of the doings there, he has got nothing by it, and must study some art by which he may live.

  But have we not promises, promises, Doctor Dee had said softly, and been mocked by Kelley: Promises, promises, they have made many promises and no good come from them.

  They would not be given a stone, having asked for bread: Doctor Dee was sure of it. As for money, he himself owes three hundred pounds and knows not where he shall find it, but he would walk the length of this land begging in a blanket if he could learn, or bowel out, some good thing, some godly wisdom, whereby to do God’s service for His glory. Tears in his eyes. He had thought Kelley was joined with him, heart to heart, in that at least. And Kelley at length put down his bag, staring at the dark of the window, and was quiet; wept too a little.

  And all those pangs had been caused by a spirit, Belmagel by name, the firebrand that hath followed thee so long: so the good angel Uriel next night informed them, as they knelt together again in the farthest room, before the table of practice on which the round glass rested, wherein Kelley (though not his employer and keeper) could discern the traffic of another world.

  The old woman who lived by the stile was called Mother Godefroy, though she had no children left her and lived alone in her tiny house. Her sons had lost the little living they had got from the common lands when the lands were enclosed by the lord of the manor and put to sheep-pasturage. At length the boys had left home, and now Mother Godefroy didn’t know where they were: beggars or outlaws on the highway or wild men digging for roots in the waste places.

  Her house by the hedge had come, over time, to be part of the hedge: the branches of locust and thorn thrust through her window in the summer, and bryony and woodbine bound her thatched roof to the hawthorns they climbed. The yellow walls were of stone patched with mud, a cave; but the yard was swept and clean, and a pot of basil and another of rosemary sunned themselves by the door; and Mother Godefroy too, on a bench there, face up to the sun.

  —Good den to you, Mother, Doctor Dee said at her gate. How goes the world with you?

  —Your worship’s kind to ask, Mother Godefroy said. The world is as it was.

  —May I come in?

  —You may come in but I will stay out, said Mother Godefroy. God bless the sun.

  He pushed the gate of wattles open, and stepped in. A black cat, startled by his entrance, leapt from the yard to the wall to the roof in two neat jumps.

  —Hush, Spittikins, my love.

  Doctor Dee sat down beside her on her bench. Her broad flat face, a moon or a pale pudding, was stubbled over with pimples; her mouth, open to let out her labored breath, showed a row of tiny sharp teeth, like a baby’s.

  —I’ve come for your advice, said Doctor Dee. And for a simple too, it may be.

  —Th’art welcome to both.

  The village of Mortlake could not have done without Mother Godefroy. It was she who knew the medicines that most folk could afford. The midwives came to her for calming and stupefying drugs, the young girls came to find out if they were loved—Mother Godefroy would suspend a scissors on a thread, or drop jackstraws, to find out—and, if they were not, to buy what would make them loved. She could make cows give, too; or dry them up, some said. One of her eyes was blue and clouded as a newborn baby’s: blind. But some said not so blind after all.

  —The young man who has come to live with me, said Doctor Dee.

  —Yes, said the cunning woman. He who sees summat in a stone.

  —Yes.

  He did not like it well that Mother Godefroy knew this about Kelley, nor did he know how she knew it. He chose not to ask, knowing that anyway it would go no farther. She had her own reasons for keeping such matters close.

  —He was to be married, said Mother Godefroy.

  —He is. He is married now. Joanna Cooper her name was, of Chipping Norton. For a time after they married she stayed at home. She wrote him letters, and he visited there. Now she is here. A youngling, but eighteen years.

  A good child she was, too, and willing, in a way that touched the heart, and yet with some hurt in her big fox’s eyes. Jane Dee, after a single night’s chiding of her beloved husband for bringing her into the house (furiously tossing the bedclothes as she rolled away from him, then back to fill his ear again) hadn’t been able to be cold to the girl; the two were friends now, better friends than either was with Kelley. Kelley’s new wife was dutiful and cheerful, and sat by him in the evening: though Kelley would rise up now and then, and twist himself in his clothes, as though to be rid of an annoyance.

  —I think, Doctor Dee said to Mother Godefroy, I think he has not yet been with her as man to wife.

  The old woman nodded, rolled her head, and put a black-nailed thumb against her chin.

  —And ’tis he or she unwilling?

  —Well I know not certainly. But I think he is.

  —So then, said Mother Godefroy, and placed her hands again in her great lap.

  —I know you are wise, Mother. I think you may know some infusion, some herb, that might warm cold blood.

  —Well I may.

  She thought for a time, and Doctor Dee waited patiently.

  —And will you give it him secretly, or offer it to him?

  —Not secretly. None of your charms, Mother.

  She smiled, and turned her good eye upon him.

  —Secret does the work the best, she said.

  But she would not tease him, great and good man. She got up and went into her dark small house.

  Secret. Slip a posy under his pillow, she meant. Or lay a sprig of this or that on his picture, or tie it with a lock of his hair. A village girl would do so, or think of doing so, to fix her boy’s affections. The charm lay only in the flush it gave to her cheek, the hope raised in her eye, when next she saw him.

  A flush of shame burned the Doctor’s own cheek. Look what he had been brought to: begging a cunning-woman for a drug to make a man stand. Pander. Who would have thought the work would require it of him in his age.

  For it was they, the angels attendant on the glass, who had early on in their communications ordered Kelley to marry: though he protested he had no inclination to do it, nor any desire for a wife. And indeed there seemed something unformed in him, a childish way, as though he were despite his scholar’s beard a boy still, who had no use for woman.

  No, what the man loved, what warmed him and made him yearn (the only thing, so far as Doctor Dee knew), was gold. Not riches, gold: the yellow metal itself, sun’s offspring, warm (he said) to his touch.

  That time he had been sought by the officers for coining, what he had been about (he said) was no such base business but the great Work. He had had no success. If a man was to cause gold to increase and multiply, he must himself impart to it the power; no impotent or sterile man could do that (he said) and that was why (he said) the angel Michael had bade him marry, bade him swear to it on the sword of light which he held out: so that he would be fruitful. And so John Dee had set out to find him a wife, and had found one.

  From whose side Kelley would bolt in the midnight, to be found asleep in his shirt in the morning curled up before the kitchen fire like a dog.

  —There, said Mother Godefroy coming out.

  She gave the doctor a tiny beeswax bottle.

  —There is not one thing only in it but many. Melt it in a posset. Make him drink. There is a scripture to say with it.

  He put it in his wallet, and (knowing she would take no money from him) gave her a small bottle of spirits of wine, which she could not m
ake herself, for the preparing of cordials; and after he had sat and talked a time with her, he set out across the common, feeling pleased and guilty at once; the sky overhead was crowded now with clouds, and a sharp wind was rising.

  He was not barren, though, Kelley was not: for he had got with child a clear cold stone empty to everyone else’s eyes, a child, a girl-child. Doctor Dee had attended at the birth, and had helped the child to grow, till now when she could speak, and answer.

  It was on a morning in May just past when she appeared, seemingly for the first time, as they sat talking together about the Polish prince Adelbert à Lasco, about the honor he meant to do them: how such a man’s patronage might protect them from their enemies at court, of whom they had had spirit warnings. She was with them suddenly, unannounced and unforetold, “a pretty girle of 7 or 9 years, attired in a gown of Sey, changeable red and green”—Doctor Dee wrote what Kelley saw—"and her long hair rowled up in front and hanging down very long behind,” a rope of soft gold lightly braided.

  She did not stay within the glass but was quickly out and moving in the Doctor’s study, going in and out of the piles of books that were everywhere, Babel towers of books in several languages, open and closed: they seemed to give place to her and let her pass.

  —Whose maiden are you? asked Doctor Dee.

  —Whose man are you? she answered, like a quick schoolchild who knows a game.

  —I am the servant of God, said the doctor: both by my bound duty, and—I hope—by His adoption.

  She seemed pleased enough at that answer, and was about to speak herself, when there came another voice, from the corner where the great perspective glass stood:

  —You shall be beaten if you tell.

  Kelley looked up suddenly, as if stirred from a reverie, looking for whoever had spoken, and, seeing nothing, relaxed again into the strange slack posture Doctor Dee now knew so well, his hands loosely folded and held up before him but dropping ever and again slightly, as though he were passing in and out of sleep, like a torpid monk at devotions; and the child spoke again: