by John Crowley
—Mercurius, yes, said Bruno. Who is the same as Hermes. And how will you begin?
—In the night of Ægypt, said Master Dicson, and shuddered hugely.
He would tell how, before the ingenious god Theutates invented letters, which ruined the memories of men and led to endless bickering, the wise priests and living Gods of Ægypt wrote their thoughts inwardly, in a language now lost to us. Our languages—Greek, Latin, English—are nothing but the growls of beasts, roughly tamed, first used for nothing but to cry Give me, give me, or Beware, beware, and later stretched and pulled and made to imitate thought as the ape imitates man. But the words of the sacred language of Ægypt were not mere sounds or meaningless marks but were the living reflection in the soul of the things they represented.
—Hieroglyphica, said Bruno. Here we go down.
A door in the French Embassy’s garden wall opened onto Water Lane, which led under the high wall of a mansion down to the river. There they clambered through piles of bricks and stacks of timber (the riverfront was continually in transformation, building up or tearing down, Bruno watched the work by the hour from his high window even as the same work went on in his own city within). Down to slippery Buckhurst Stairs, where a boat upriver could sometimes be hailed.
—And how will your patrons like your dialogue? Bruno said. It seems it may not be to their taste.
—If there be true matter in it, they will welcome it, Dicson said doubtfully. I will dedicate it to Sir Philip.
—Sir Sed-Ne, Bruno said, and laughed. Sir But-No.
They were Bruno’s patrons too—Sir But-No and his circle, Sir Fulke Greville, the Earl of Leicester. The Queen remotely, who knew him now by sight. The lords had got him a further course of lectures at Oxford, despite what had happened, and they were well attended at first, probably because of what had happened; still his hearers had no idea what to make of him, lecturing rapidly in his monkish Latin, raising giggles by his pronunciation, struggling with Aristotle as Jacob did with the angel; and then—unable or unwilling to hear the warning murmurs from his hearers—stepping into dangerous topics as though walking off a dock: how heaven’s powers are drawn down into the soul, metensomatosis, the forging of links with airy intelligences. This was far worse than Copernicus.
They came to him privily, and charged him with plagiarism, for taking all his lectures from Ficino, which was not wholly true but was a lesser charge, and without civil penalties; and John Florio and others of his new friends (indolent Sam Daniel the sonneteer, good Matthew Gwynne) took Bruno aside, and bade him think of the Ambassador who had been so kind to him: and so he had graciously consented to give up his lectures.
Let them know that he was a Nolan, born under a kindlier sky. Pigs.
—The tide is in, Dicson said. Beware. I have fallen in this river.
—No, Bruno said. Not this river. Another one. You can’t fall in the same river twice.
Laughing, Dicson took his teacher’s arm, helping him through the slob to where a very old boat awaited.
—They built that boat, Bruno said. Those two ancients in it. In the beginning of time. What river is this? Styx?
The boat, leaking and foul-bottomed, pushed out into the tidewater, borne upriver with the traffic on the swell. Two kinds of clouds sped over the hard blue, a dense and full-rigged kind, and long pale veils beyond them. Dicson negotiated a tip with the aged boatmen for the trip to Mortlake; by law the watermen were not allowed to take more than sixpence, but the wise traveler knew they had means of making the journey unpleasant for the punctilious.
Then he sat beside Bruno.
—For my Art of Memory, he said. It will be no great work such as yours is.
—We must walk before we can fly.
—I am fearful how it will be received.
—By whom?
—There are many in this country, and in the Universities especially, who do not love images. They have torn them from the churches, and from the prayer-books.
—I, too, fear those people, Bruno said. The justified. The elect who have done nothing to win election. I fear them more than death.
Dicson hesitated. He had not heard the Nolan ever say he feared anything.
—They will say, Dicson said, that to make images in the mind, and set them up in the soul, is idolatry.
Bruno laughed hugely.
—They believe they can think thoughts without them, he said. They who pretend to love Aristotle! To think is to speculate with images. Aristotle, Aristotle, Aristotle.
—The hieroglyphs of Ægypt, said Dicson.
—Were images.
The hieroglyphs represented to the mind the unsayable words of the Ægyptian language. They were not cut in stone as an aid to memory—the Ægyptians needed no such aid, for the signs cut in memory were more perfect, more lasting, and above all alive and capable of change: permutation, peregrination, combination and generation. The stone records were for praise, cut on obelisks pointing to the sky, lifting the heart.
—Or perhaps, said Dicson, cut to instruct a later age. When the true Ægyptian religion was forgotten.
Hermes had predicted it; Dicson had read the writings, laid down before Moses was born. Night would fall over the land, the priests would lose their powers, and barbarians would rule in their stead; the gods themselves would abandon Ægypt, and her people forget how to honor them, forget that once gods had dwelt among them, forget all: would come to believe the truths handed down in fragments of those times to be but fables, and the powers lies.
They were not lies. Philotheus Brunus Nolanus, seated beside him on the Thames, possessed them. Into the figures which he had set up within himself—seals of the natures of things, statues of the star-gods, emblems of actuality—he was able to invite the vivifying spirits who everywhere inhabit matter, who fill earth, air, water, and the sky; and he bound those powers to the statues and talismans of his heart. And they spoke.
Bruno said:
—If, in the bright day of Ægypt, they possessed such powers, then in the course of things they had perforce to lose them; and we, now, who have none of those powers, in the course of things may gain them again.
Dicson thought: It’s to return, then, that age, and just in time. He was not going to miss it. It was going to return in the person of this little Italian with the funny strut and the pugnacious chin. Dicson laughed, and even as he laughed grateful tears rushed to his eyes.
Ægypt, from where all knowledge comes, font from which Plato and Pythagoras had drunk. Hermes, god-man, had been a king in Ægypt. Hermes taught how Ægypt’s priests had drawn down from the celestial realms the spirits of stars, airy intelligences, the guardians of the divisions of time, and caused them to take up their abode in the titanic statues of men and animals and animal-men which the priests had constructed, statues expressive of the nature of the spirits invited into them; when the priests had bound a spirit to its appropriate statue, then the statue could be made to speak, prophesy, tell truths of the nature of things.
He had seen so often in imagination those temples of the morning, in which vast images of gods and beasts had presided; some still stood, he had been told, buried in the sands of Ægypt; the statues broken now, the rites forgotten.
Now, now, in the greatest darkness of ignorance and strife—would it not be now that a kindly God would open men’s hearts to a new revelation? Might it not be? Dawn winds rising as night turned pale; the cruel and stupid brawls of nightwalking sectarians ceasing, the ignorant fleeing from the rising sun of new knowledge, unexpected powers, vivid images. Wisdom appearing, to open men’s hearts and minds, wisdom to reconcile kings and popes, to heal Christ’s Body falsely and foolishly divided.
Wisdom to reconcile (O let it not be too late) the Queens of North and South, whose statues, painted in red and in green, stood in the temple of Alexander Dicson’s heart: the Queen of Scotland whose subject he was, she for whom men swore to die; and the Queen of England, the Virgin Queen he served here, she for whom men swore
to live.
The boatmen put them off at Mortlake village stairs, not listening when they were told another stairs farther on was the house they wanted; they were dumped in the smelly mud (the tide turning, the boat tugging at the poles to be off again downriver) and cursed to boot as they floundered to the stairs.
—Tanchi, maester, Bruno called back, one of the few English phrases he would say aloud, and bowed outrageously. He pulled Dicson after him up the stairs, up the village street past the church and the cross, where the gossips looked up in astonishment to hear them speak in an unknown tongue and crossed themselves when the two had passed. They asked at the low dark tavern for the way, and several drunk men looked at them with bellicose suspicion, and would not answer.
Out across the golden, laden fields, guessing the way. Crows cawed in warning. The two men were silent now, feeling a foreboding, what was it.
Doctor Dee’s house. Despite the day and the warmth, the shutters were tight shut on the upper storey; but the gate gaped open. They went in. A medicinal garden where the bees were loud. Riot of flowers never tended. They banged the lion-head knocker, but no one came.
No one.
They went around the house, at loose ends now. Why was no serving girl, no boy in the house?
—The library, Bruno said.
The shutters were not shut. Dicson bent, made his hands a stirrup, and Bruno was lifted up to look.
Dim silent stillness. He cupped his hands against the glass to see better. Some shelves had been emptied; some instruments covered with cloths. Bruno sent out his spirit strongly, and the space within brightened.
There. It lay still on the table where he had read it, still open to the title page. Monas hieroglyphica. It burned blackly against the gray parchment page.
But he could not get at it. Could not question it.
Dicson said: Look.
He lowered Bruno. They looked off Richmond-ward. Across the fields a small crowd could be seen: reapers, it might be, with rakes. A torch. Coming this way. Not reapers.
The two men stood in the bland sunlight by the wall of the abandoned house. Bruno could hear around him the buzz and chatter of many elementals, who had been left behind like cats, unable to be taken from the earth and the house.
Dicson said: Let’s be off.
Bruno, drawn back fruitlessly to this house, abandoned too, lifted empty hands.
—Gone, he said.
They had departed in the dark, all of a sudden; John Dee had put his affairs in order on Monday, signed his house and goods over to his wife’s brother on the Wednesday, and on Saturday set out to meet Prince Laski on the river, who was himself leaving in haste, under suspicion, somewhat in the way of a man letting himself out an inn-window on a knotted sheet, his bill unpaid.
They all filed down the water-stairs in the deep dark, Kelley, and Jane, and Joanna Kelley, and Kelley’s brother too who had got a position not by threats exactly but after allowing that his brother might rather have him by his side than left at home in England to be questioned. Trunks and boxes bumping down the mossy steps and small children carried sleeping aboard.
And tucked down in the baggage, wrapped up in batting, stuffed inside a velvet cap, but alight in Kelley’s inward eye, the crystal glass; and Madimi restless inside it.
At Barn Elms down the dark river from John Dee’s house Philip Sidney that night lay for the first time with Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. The wedding, to pay for which Sir Philip had sold his share in Humphrey Gilbert’s expedition to Atlantis, had taken place in some splendor there, that very day; lights were still lit on the grounds and in the house, and a consort of music still playing, as the wherries that Prince Laski had hired for them slipped by without lights. Sidney laughed softly with his bride, learning she was wiser than he had known her to be, and wittier too—but not knowing that a thousand miles to westward, Gilbert on that night would go down in a storm off Newfoundland, leading his fleet through the dark in the little frigate Squirrel, “till soddenlye her lights were out.”
Next morning Dee’s party put out in a Danish double-flyboat to cross the Narrow Sea, with a boyar for Duke Alasco and his horses and men; but the wind blew them back to England, and would have sunk the ship’s boat in which they returned to shore, but for Kelley, who bailed mightily with a great gauntlet (Madoc’s?) that was among the luggage. The sailors carried them ashore, and Dee’s children, Rowland and Arthur and Katherine, laughed to see their father dropped in the mud from the captain’s back.
They set out again; prayers and a little white wizardry, and this time they got away briskly. Autumn was coming, it was in the sea wind, what makes it seem at once new and valedictory. They reached Brill, changed to a hoy of Amsterdam, changed that for scuts to sail up the cold canals. They were in Haarlem when Bruno came knocking at the door in Mortlake: Dee heard his name suddenly called across the gray water, and looked up, to see no one there.
In November the net of evidence (much of it got from Mauvissière’s chaplain and his secretary) closed around Francis Throckmorton and Henry Howard. Walsingham had them arrested, searched Throckmorton’s papers, found lists of Catholic noblemen, plans of invasion, tracts, letters to the Prince of Parma in the Netherlands. Under torture he confessed. Letters intercepted between Mary of Scotland and Mauvissière implicated the Earl of Northumberland and the Spanish Ambassador. Elizabeth would not allow Mary to be touched, not yet if ever: but she agreed to expel Bernardino de Mendoza, because his plotting “disturbed the realm of England.” He was put on a ship at Greenwich in the rain and bade good riddance. Tell your mistress, he shouted at them from the fly-boat’s deck, that Bernardino de Mendoza was born not to disturb kingdoms but to conquer them.
There was already a further, a far greater plot in the making.
Northumberland committed suicide in the Tower, shooting himself in the breast with a pistol, among the first men known to history to use this means to avoid torture and disgrace. Throckmorton stayed in prison till the summer, when he was brought out of his cell in his shirt, an olive-wood rosary in his hands that had been blessed by the Pope; he vomited his last meal, a common occurrence and no shame. His head was struck off in a single blow; but because of the false vow he had once sworn in the company of so many loyal gentlemen to protect and defend the Queen, his right hand was cut off too, and Walsingham himself stooped to pick it up.
FIVE
What seemed remarkable to Pierce Moffett, the more remarkable as he read it for a second time, was how much Kraft had written here, and how little he had made up. There was maybe not a lot of the smell or the feel or the taste of the past, whatever those had really been like to experience; but there was a lot in it that had really been thought and said, and very little that hadn’t, even though at the same time it was all quite impossible and pretend, a fairy tale. This trick could certainly not have been easy, and the achieving of it might have been amusing and even a little thrilling, if anybody who was not well versed in the history could have perceived him doing it.
Bruno had indeed resided at the French Embassy, doing some sort of something, and there were really spies in the house; he had indeed gone to Oxford to debate before the Polish magnate Laski, a real person, and had been shouted down, though it’s nowhere recorded exactly what he said. Alexander Dicson was a real person too, a retainer of Sidney’s; Sidney really had a scheme to transport the Catholics of England to America, and really did arrange the entertainment for Laski at Oxford. Pierce happened to know.
And Laski on his way back from Oxford had dropped in on Dee. But Pierce had never heard that Bruno came too.
Could he have?
Could Kraft have really known that John Dee and Giordano Bruno met in England? Known from what source, how, where? Why did it seem so likely once it was said? In his own brief biography of Bruno (Bruno’s Journey, 1931), Kraft had said nothing about Dee, but that was no scholarly book really, and written long ago. Why did Dee so suddenly leave for the Continent at the end of
that summer? It was that summer, wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t, liberties taken, times collapsed together; as far as Pierce remembered, John Dee had already left England when Bruno arrived.
He arose from his chair, Kraft’s chair, and left the study where Kraft had spent so many hours; he went out through the puzzle of the little house (puzzling to one like Pierce, who could not ever reverse in his mind the way he had entered a place in order to leave it, nor always tell left from right). He stopped in the center of the faded rug in the room where Kraft had chiefly lived.
In here somewhere, he just bet.
Whenever these days Pierce found a footnote or a citation in one of his own secondary sources saying that such-and-such a fact or bit of lore could be found in such-and-such an old book, the source would lodge in his brain, alert as a dog’s nose now to the traces of Kraft’s track through these past woods. There were only a few sources that Pierce knew of for Dee, and they would be here, as well perhaps as other ones that he didn’t know of, that might tell a longer though not necessarily a truer story.
John Dee, strange tireless man, really had written down all the conversations that he and Edward Kelley had with the angels who visited Dee’s glass. He kept another record too, of all the human comings and goings at his Mortlake house. Both of these had been printed, though Pierce had never seen either one. The secret record had first been published in the seventeenth century, a very famous book ever since in some circles: A True & Faithful Relation of what passed for many Yeers betweene Dr. John Dee, a Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Elizabeth and King James their Reignes, and some Spirits; Tending (had it succeeded) To a General Alteration of most States and Kingdomes in the World.
This big book was issued in 1659 by Meric Casaubon, the Huguenot refugee and Protestant polemicist. Casaubon was quite sure that Dee and Kelley had talked to spirits, and that they were wicked ones; that their relations with such spirits had damned them; that the “general alteration” would have been a frightful disaster, a demonic empire from which the world was narrowly saved; the author then shewing the Uses that a sober Christian may make of all, as the gigantic title finally concluded, that is, the avoidance of spirits altogether: this warning issued just as the great Terror was drawing to an end, a hundred thousand or more old women, men, vagrants, priests, and children having been burned, tortured, crushed, drowned, and hanged for such dealings.