by John Crowley
—Am I not a fair maiden?
—Do you know I cannot see you? Doctor Dee said gently. I think you must be fair, but I cannot see.
—Let me play in your house, she said. My mother told me she would come here and dwell with you, she did.
—Well, said Doctor Dee, amazed and amused, as he was before his own daughters’ inventions. Well, now …
But she seemed to lose interest then, and Kelley told how she went around the room, forgetting about the skryer and his master as she was absorbed in what she saw and in her own responses, as any girl might be; sometimes she sang.
—I pray you let me stay a little while, she said, still speaking to the unseen one, as to a careful but beloved nurse: and she laughed lightly, having got the someone’s permission perhaps, and Doctor Dee, though he said he could not see her, began to know how she looked; could see her tumble of blond hair and the red of her fat cheeks, her great honey-colored eyes the only abashing thing about her, the only thing not childlike, innocent and plain as a child’s but not a child’s.
—Tell me who you are.
—I pray you let me play a little with you and I will tell you who I am.
—In the name of Jesus then, tell me.
In a play-acting voice, a story-telling voice, she said:
—I rejoice in the name of Jesus, and I am a poor little maiden, Madimi. I am the last—but one—of my mother’s children. And in another voice, a little girl pretending: And I have little baby children at my home.
—Where is your home? asked Doctor Dee.
—I dare not tell you where I dwell, I shall be beaten.
—You shall not be beaten for telling the truth to them that love the truth, said Doctor Dee—responding immediately, as he might have to any mistaken child, not wondering then where it was she might have come from that she would be beaten for revealing it to him.
—To the eternal truth (he said piously, raising a forefinger as he might have to one of his daughters) all creatures must be obedient.
—I will be, she said. And I will come live with you. And then, gaily: My sisters all say they must come live with you too. And Doctor Dee could hear, not with his ears, the silver of her small laughter.
So old Abbot Trithemius was wrong, wise as that holy abbot had been concerning angels, to say they never took female form. Perhaps in deference to monkish scruples they had chosen not to appear so to Trithemius.
But they could; they could be, or appear to be, women, or girl-children anyway, children changeable and full of fancies and continual invention, too young to know real from pretend, or to care to distinguish them; quick, and vain, and loving too.
They could be children: but could they also be born, and grow? Though it seemed that Madimi had never appeared to them before that white May morning, Edward Kelley then thought of the first night ever he had skryed there in Doctor Dee’s upper chamber, that night in March a year before, 1582, it seemed far longer ago; how he had first knelt and after solemn prayer looked into the doctor’s sphere of moleskin-colored crystal. Amid the smiling potent figures who had begun to crowd into the stone almost as soon as he looked into it he had seen one who bore a looking-glass, and in that glass there opened a window, and in that window sat a little naked girl-child, who seemed to bear a sphere of crystal in her hand: and her eyes (as he thought now) were large and honey-colored, piercing and mild, as Madimi’s were.
And then on an evening later in that spring, when they had made a table of practice according to angelic instructions, and lacked only a new and virgin stone to place in its center, there had appeared in the chamber’s western window, amid the ingots of dusty sunlight that the mullions cast, another naked girl-child, older by years than the first; and in her hand a globe that was (Doctor Dee wrote furiously, describing, so as not to forget) “most bright, most clere and glorious, of the bigness of an egg.” The archangel Michael had pointed to the globe with his sword (a bar of light too) and spoken, bidding Doctor Dee “take it up, and let no mortal hand touch it but thine own.” And the child placed it in the center of their table, in the claws of the silver frame, which were set to hold just this stone though they had not known it, this stone out of which a child of seven had now stepped, in her gown of green and red, her feet still bare.
If angels could grow from infancy to girlhood, could they be born? If they could be born, could they die? Doctor Dee had among his thousands of volumes a work of Porphyry, wherein he says that wicked spirits who live near the earth have spiritual bodies, which like ours are mortal and need to be fed.
No: she was not a child, and she had no body at all; she was not a she, no more a he. That she seemed one was no more than his and Kelley’s flawed sight and darkened souls: they must needs perceive something sensible in the play of power concentrated in the stone, the bodiless intelligences passing by there as by a perspective glass—just as, mortal, they could not help but see faces in clouds and gesturing personages in the wind-moved leaves of trees. It was a kindness of those immortals, so to show themselves to the poor seekers who could not know them as they were, whose human senses would be burned like Isaiah’s lip if once an angel covered them undisguised.
There had been other forms before Madimi, other persons coming and going within the sphere, passing in and out as though through a market gate: Michael armed and Uriel clothed with light, and others the Doctor had not before heard of, Galvah and Nalvage, Bobogel and Il. Bobogel is sage and grave; his beard is long and a black feather nods in his velvet cap; he wears scholar’s slipslop slippers. Il is a merry fellow, appareled like a Vice in an old-fashioned play, with a belly ungirded that shakes when he laughs and hose bagging at the knees. Kelley said that now and again when he knelt alone before the crystal without his master, this Il would show him bawdry, copulations, the unseen doings of airy dæmons, and laugh.
Oh, he had doubted; he had doubted Kelley, who might well know the tricks of those London friends out of whose circle Doctor Dee had rescued him—coneycatchers and blessers and quacksalvers who could cozen with throwing of the voice and a thousand other arts. He had doubted the spirits too, and so had Kelley, antic and common sometimes as a London crowd, bragging up and down, mixing their matter with gibberish and jests. But he had learned too much from them already, and he needed too badly to learn more, to believe they were evil. Only long afterward, after they had abased him and hollowed him, pithed him like a crab and left him to linger naked in his bones, would he recall what the child had said to him (she whom alone of them he had loved) when he asked how he could be sure he was not illuded here by fallen angels drawn to his stone and to his need. All the angels, she had said, are fallen angels.
All the angels are fallen angels: Neither glad nor sad at it, her light gay eyes unclouded. And he had thought it a childish riddle without meaning.
THREE
Men may not always know that they live in a period of crisis, Time hovering at a crossroads, about to choose a way: but those living in Britain and in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century knew it.
There had fallen, just in those late years of that age of the world, a pause or halt—it could not be called a calm—in the hundred years’ war of the destruction of European Christendom. Though arms had been laid down the war had not ceased; it had grown more terrible as it rested, like a dragon on his hoard, the parties ever more willing to contemplate absolute solutions to the divisions they saw around them, men ever more unable to live if it meant letting live. Even those who longed for peace and charity could imagine no peace but Perfect Peace, no reformation but the Universal Reformation of the Whole Wide World.
Nearly four centuries later, twentieth of another world, there would come a time that felt, to those who lived through it, like that one in the sixteenth. A time when one war had ended, leaving (besides the millions dead) a deep dissatisfaction, the memory of unforgivable wrongs, and a longing for absolute solutions. The hatreds and hopes of Christian sectarianism would be cold or at least harmless by th
en; but there would be worse hopes, and much better armed. Then as now (now, June 1583, a brilliant and blessed morning) men were either unwilling to imagine another war, or unable to think of anything else. Then as now, there were men of broad ironic sensibilities, good-humored men to whom nothing human was alien or even surprising, men who were sure that a humble skepticism was more productive of truth than angry certainties; and, push by shove, in the years fast coming, each of those men would be deprived of his liberty of mind, and forced to take a side.
Sir Philip Sidney was such a man, Protestant, knight, poet, courtier. He had been born a Catholic, under Mary Tudor; in fact the King of Spain, Mary’s husband, first Catholic gentleman of the world, had stood godfather for him, and in baby Philip’s name had abjured Satan and all his pomps and works—a story Sidney told with that open mirthful smile that sweetened the hearts of those he turned it on, without ever quite revealing the secrets of his own heart, nor even whether secrets were kept there.
History knows that on this morning he was already marked to die, in a Netherlandish meadow, in one of the small wars that kept the old ulcers open and bleeding till the great hemorrhage came; but he didn’t know it. He was riding up the Thames road toward the University of Oxford, accompanying a visiting Polonian magnate—a Catholic, whom the French Embassy was seeing to. A young Scot in his service rode beside him, who seemed all atremble with excitement over this visit, though he would not say why. Sir Philip had nominal charge over the entertainments to be offered the Polack at Oxford, and Sir Francis Walsingham had also given him a further charge, to find out, if he could, what powers this Prince actually commanded, and what influence he had with the King there: no one knew quite what to make of him. He was not thinking about these matters as he rode, however. He was thinking about Catholics, and Atlantis, and his marriage.
Two gentlemen, Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerard (a convicted recusant and papist), had proposed a scheme that might bring peace to England, peace from her internal enemies at least, and justice to the old-religionists in their bitterness. Sir Francis Walsingham, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State (and Sir Philip Sidney’s father-in-law-to-be), had shown interest in the project; the Catholics of England were his constant worry. Peckham and Gerard wanted an immense grant of the New World to be given freehold to the Catholics of England, with perfect liberty to live and worship there, on condition they never returned. The more he thought about this, the more Sir Philip Sidney thought it equitable, sure, and simple. He was still quite a young man.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert had set out for the West with his fleet not two months before. Sidney’s heart was with them: he had wanted to go. But he was to be married that summer instead, a different sort of journey. Gilbert, great heart, had granted to his friend Sir Philip Sidney the profits of a million acres of the New World, to which he would lay claim; Sidney had in turn granted half of it to Sir George Peckham, for his Catholic colony in Atlantis.
Atlantis: the other, mirror shore of the Atlantic. John Dee (who always called it so) had loaned Gilbert maps and given advice, and for his long support and bottomless enthusiasm Gilbert had granted Dee a patent on all lands that the expedition would lay claim to above the fiftieth parallel.
Sir Philip Sidney laughed to think of it, his old teacher lord in absentia over a dukedom larger than England. Alexander Dicson at his side smiled inquiringly.
—A good day to be elsewhere, said the knight.
—A good day, sir.
—I thought of Gilbert, said Sidney.
—Yes.
The doctor should have gone along himself with Gilbert, Sidney thought. He imagined the old man’s white beard stirred in the winds of New-found-land: he should have been able to put his foot on the shore as Madoc the Welsh giant once did, Dee’s forebear, of whom Dee had told him. By this Lord Madoc, the Welsh ancestors of Queen Elizabeth had claim to Atlantis, Dee said, and so had her glorious Majesty; and Sidney thought of Elizabeth, crowned by savages, throned in the West.
—We have got ahead of our guests, he said to Dicson. Hold up.
Dicson pulled hard at the reins of his borrowed horse, a fiery yearling.
—Hold up, he said to it. Hold up.
Whenever the Prince Alasco glanced back along the line of their progress, the small man in the gown of stuff seemed to have moved up a place among the riders. There was no particular reason to notice him, except for his progress toward the van; but once when the Prince looked back, the man caught his eye with a frank stare and a smile oddly intense.
—Upon arrival at the gates of the University, his secretary continued. An oratio by the Dean of Christchurch, a college. A concert of music, and fireworks. A gift.
—Yes, said the Prince.
—Next day, a Latin sermon at Divine Service in Your Grace’s honor. Exercitiones. Dinner.
—Ah, said the Prince.
—In the afternoon, disputations at St. Mary’s. In Divinity. Law. Physic. Natural and moral philosophy.
—Good, said the Prince. He glanced back again along the line of riders, knights, men at arms, sergeants, stewards, and serving-men on foot. The man in the gown was closer to his coach.
—Next day …
—Enough, said the Prince. They are too kind.
The Prince à Lasco, Voivode of Sieradz in Poland, was sensible of the honor done him, and the more gratified that the Queen herself had ordered it. He was in no easy state. Unless the stars and the powers were favorable, Albertus Alascus might not be returning to Poland soon; what the good Queen no doubt intended as tribute that would make him a firm ally, Albrecht Laski himself needed as props to his claims at home. But it mattered little; Duke Laski (no one was quite sure how to style him, or what exactly he was to be called) had won everyone’s good favor by his affability, his extravagant Polish manners, his wide learning, his generous heart. He had a magnificent broad white beard that grew up his cheeks almost to his eyes, and when he retired, he amused those attending by the way he spread it out across the coverlet.
—Who, he asked his secretary, is this gentleman riding the white mule? I have been introduced to him?
—An Italian, said his secretary (who was himself Italian). A servant of the French Ambassador. He brought Your Grace the Ambassador’s greetings, such as they were. Your Grace remembers.
—Hm.
—He is down for a disputation.
—Hm, said the Count Palatine. He rides like a friar. I wonder.
His attention was just then drawn to the view by his host and guide, Sir Philip Sidney, who had waited for the carriage to pull abreast of his blue-caparisoned horse.
—Magnificent! said the Polonian, opening his arms to the day and the river. I am deeply moved.
It was that perfect summer day (but one in a year, and that only with luck, in this country) on which the old poets began their stories, the grass high, roses blooming and nodding, airs kindly on the face, and a spiritus moving feelably through it all, almost able to be heard, like a concert of winds. And the country all around, not magnificent at all but little—little it seemed to him, like the scenes in a Book of Hours: men at their work, the winding road, glimpse of a castle’s tower in a cleft of hills, or a great house made in the English fashion of mud and sticks. He thought of his own country.
—Around the river’s bend (said the knight, leaning down to Alasco in his coach) we will see the Queen’s palace at Richmond. Her favorite of all her palaces.
—And those fields, across the river, that house?
—That is Barn Elms. The house now being built by Sir Francis Walsingham. He has caught the fever of building.
And he studied the far bank, not actually supposing he would see the Secretary’s daughter, whom he would marry by summer’s end.
—Then, said the Prince. The town that rises there is Mortlake.
—Yes. Mortlake, between the Queen and her Secretary.
—I have visited there. The one man in your kingdom whom I knew I must seek out. He was well k
nown to the Queen, who graciously sent me to him.
—I know the man you mean, said Sir Philip.
—Doctor Dee. Whose fame has reached even as far as my country.
—He has traveled widely.
—I was very well received there, said the Prince (with an air almost of awe, as though surprised to have been taken in). He lives very simply. I wonder if by his own choice.
The knight said nothing.
—Not without honor, save in his own country. That was my thought.
—He has all the honor I can give him. He was my childhood tutor.
The Polonian looked up at Sir Philip with a new respect, his face full of that generous expression that said The more I learn of you the more credit you have with me. Then he turned his gaze toward the far bank again, as though he had rather have been there than here; and started slightly when his secretary tugged at his sleeve. When Laski turned, the secretary showed him with a hand, almost apologetically, the man on the white mule, who had come up beside him.
—Permit me to present to Your Grace Signor Doctor Giordano Bruno Nolano, a philosopher, my countryman.
—A philosopher, said Laski, and lifted the hat from his head an inch.
—I am proud, the man said in Latin, to claim that name which so many have soiled by wearing it.
—Philosophy is a shield time cannot tarnish, said the Duke in Latin. Then, in Italian: If now we shed our clothes and swam to that bank, we would find more philosophy in a house there than we are likely to find in this University we make such slow progress toward.
He looked to Sir Philip then, afraid he might have offended (of course the knight knew Italian, no man of any gentility was without Italian nowadays), and saw him smiling, his face full of amusement and even wonder. He was looking, not at Duke Laski, but at the new Philosopher. Alexander Dicson beside him just then unwittingly spurred his mad steed, and was nearly thrown.