by Lloyd Jones
He was a close friend of Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe and John Donne – but having friends in high places didn’t prevent him from being arraigned before Star Chamber in 1555, falsely accused of killing a child and blinding another by practising wizardry; he was also accused of using his supernatural powers to attack Mary while she was queen, though she still commissioned him to do her horoscope. He spent three months in jail. He also did Elizabeth’s horoscope and once, having dined out, she called at his home and insisted that he walk alongside her horse so that they could talk; she sent him sweets from her table when he was ill. Shakespeare reputedly based King Lear and Prospero on him.
Elizabeth licensed Dee to conduct alchemic experiments. And so his great search began… later, much later, he was to sell the Voynich Manuscript, the most mysterious cipher ever known (now at Yale University and still undeciphered) to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, for a pot of gold. Which is where the golem comes in.
John Dee went to Prague to experiment with gold. Everyone was seeking renewal, it was a golden century: some pored over magic texts, others laboured at forges, melting metals; some sought to rule the stars, and others invented secret alphabets and universal languages. In Prague, Rudolph II turned his court into an alchemic laboratory, into which he invited the most brilliant minds of the age: men like Comenius and John Dee.
Dee believed that throughout the ages a Great White Fraternity, a cohort of a few wise men, were journeying through human history in order to preserve a core of eternal knowledge. History did not happen randomly – it was the work of the Masters of the World. Dee’s visit to Prague coincided almost exactly with the creation of Rabbi Loew’s famous golem, that marvellous man of clay brought to life when the Rabbi fed pieces of paper bearing a cipher into its mouth.
Further extracts from PC 66’s black notebooks: Night is approaching. The memorial rites have been completed. The storm has abated; the lords of misrule, wanting more fun later, have applied a tourniquet to the sky’s haemorrhage and the clouds have clotted into sullen, cheerless scabs, although streamlets still course down the cobbled streets, seawards. I look out on a deep tract of hideous ruin and combustion, bathed in a mournful gloom. The townspeople, however, are in carnival spirits – they seem glad that he’s gone for good.
Who went into Mr Cassini’s house on the day of the funeral, after the plume of blue smoke had drifted over the sea, after the capstone’s rasp on the granite slabs?
The first to walk past the pig-head knocker was his daughter, Olwen. Next to walk past the pig-head knocker was PC 66. Last to walk past the pig-head knocker was Mojo the Fair, Mr Cassini’s diminutive but perfectly formed son, fair-haired and blue-eyed, hairless of face and body, who was sent to frighten the birds with his rattle in the crop-fields on his fifteenth birthday. But they flocked around him as if he were St Francis of Assisi because no living creature, great or small, was frightened of Mojo – a tatterdemalion dot in the high acres: he sits with his rattle in his hand, at the edge of a lake in the mountains, a lake with an island which seems to float on the water. He wears gloves. He has never spoken a word to anyone.
So there we were, in the kitchen, the ghosts of Mr Cassini and Mrs Cassini, and – in the flesh – Olwen and me and Mojo the Fair. That kitchen stank. Mr Cassini’s great big fry-ups revolted everyone. The first thing you saw, on a grease-splattered wall, was a strange map. Mr Cassini had become enthused one night, after his customary ten pints in the Blue Angel, and he had torn the Wales page from an old road atlas. On it he had glued a thread of red yarn which snaked along all the roads taken by a coach when the WI had gone to Cardiff. Mrs Cassini had been with them – it was the only time she’d left town. Some of the yarn had become detached and now looped through impassable mountain ranges around Pumlumon in the mid-part of the country. I realised, suddenly, that I was sitting on the reason for Mrs Cassini’s trip to Cardiff – a red cushion with a patchwork map of all the counties of Wales. It had won first prize in a national WI convention. The cushion stuck to my arse when I got up to look at it better. Mr Cassini had dropped so many sausages on it that it stuck to anything near it, like Velcro. I feel sick when I remember Mr Cassini’s hideous breakfasts. Mr Cassini had an ancient belly which had been prepared for excess since his childhood with vast quantities of cold lumpy porridge, fetid goat’s cheese and rancid mutton.
The story of the golem fascinated Mr Cassini, and that is why he made his own man of clay, who sits silently – expectantly? – among a group of figures in Mr Cassini’s living room, waiting for Mr Cassini to feed him a cipher, so that he can spring to life and startle all the sharks in the Blue Angel by walking in and demanding a pint of the landlord’s best elixir. He’s a little shabby now.
I feel honour bound to be straight with you from the start, since after all I am a policeman, an upholder of verity and true law. Mr Cassini was fascinated by borders. I suppose we all are, really. Boundaries between land and sea – why else would we spend so much time at the water’s edge? – and boundaries between truth and fiction, good and bad, sanity and madness. Mr Cassini said the insane know far more about sanity than the sane know about insanity.
‘Porky,’ he would say to me down there on the strand, ‘you must remember this, boy. Poets, the oracles of long ago, believed that all wisdom and knowledge was to be found at the water’s edge.’
The Tiwi people, who live on a group of islands off Australia, bury their kin immediately after death but delay the funeral ritual for several months, until the family’s grief has subsided. How sensible. Here am I, full of grief, trying to direct you through the last stages of my friend’s life, and my eyes are full of tears. Yes, like plays and films, funerals have their directors too; the bit part actors have all learnt their lines, and I am left to ponder a few last-minute changes to the script, on the phone to my lead actors maybe, suggesting a change of pace...
Tomorrow, another court case starts.
I’m tired. Also angry, I think. Not angry because so many people were killed – just angry that I was involved at all, since I wasn’t on duty that night. I was, in fact, at a party. Since no one will read this deposition except the two of us, I can tell you that the party was, how shall I put it, slightly irregular. Not quite a shebeen, but I didn’t question the provenance of the hooch which flowed from an enormous pan, it looked like an old cockle cauldron, in the middle of the floor. God knows where the pan came from, though Mr Cassini said he’d bought it from an Irish tinker. Mr Cassini sourced all his ‘doubtful’ acquisitions to travellers and tinkers from across the water – it was a handy device, which he used often.
Anyway, we were on the island, opposite the marshlands, in a rickety old shack and we were roaring drunk. Mr Cassini, his big knobbly nose gleaming sweatily between his eyes, was arm-wrestling with one of the hairy-arsed farmers who till the meagre soil above the town. It was then, apparently, though I didn’t hear it myself, that one of the revellers heard a voice screaming above the wind outside, a supernatural scream in the night. A storm had broken suddenly while we drank Mr Cassini’s potion (had time stood still, or had we drunk ourselves insensible? We had been in that shack for three days without knowing it.) My notes tell me that in the midst of that barbarous dissonance a number of the men heard a fell shriek in the darkness; a hag-voice which screamed the words vengeance is coming. Just the once, but the incident was enough to wake us all from our drugged state. We realised, suddenly, how ill we felt from the drink, and how pitiably small we were in the teeth of that storm. A huge depression settled on all of us; through the one cobwebbed window I saw a flight of swans disappearing seawards, into a bank of rolling clouds.
Since it was a priority for me, as a policeman, to get back to civilisation, I commandeered the little blue dingy drawn up on the island’s sole landing-point and cast myself into her, then Mr Cassini launched us into the boiling surf and threw himself in also. It is less than a hundred yards between island and shore, but we only just made it: the boat was swa
mped some twenty yards out and we were carried for the rest of the way by thunderous breakers which pummelled us and spat us out on the strand. We saw now, in a pallid dawn, that the sea was high up against the shore, higher than we had ever seen it before. In the distance, just within vision, we could see a wreck thrown up on the eastern headland. The wind howled and whistled all around us, and we could barely stay upright. Even then I wondered how we had failed to notice this gale brewing as we supped in the shack.
I dried out in the police station and as soon as I’d done so a wild-eyed man arrived at the door, pointing eastwards beyond Big Bay, and urging me to go with all haste to help the people there, for they were in dire straits. The sea had inundated the land, he said, and many had drowned. Whole villages had disappeared.
Three days later, in a mountain bothy, I apprehended the dyke-keeper who was responsible for maintaining the embankment, and charged him with neglecting his duties. It was now that things got difficult for me, since – by a horrible quirk of fate – he had been one of my fellow-revellers in the island shack on the night of the storm. It transpired that he was a friend of Mr Cassini’s, involved in the smuggling trade (he supplied the Cassini empire with tobacco and spirits), and was delivering a cache to Mr Cassini on the night of the inundation. This was lucky for him, but extremely infortuitous for me. Mr Cassini had a word with him, and I don’t know what he said, but this fellow has promised to say nothing of my inappropriate behaviour, though I am fair sweaty with fear.
It was a relatively small inundation, as inundations go – that’s what Mr Cassini said. But I tell you, that night was to change our lives for ever. It was sometime during that terrible storm that Mr Cassini told me his plan. For the next dummy in his front room he had set his heart on a woman close to both of us. Mrs Cassini. Worse still, it was me who would betray her. My guilt weighs on me heavily. But I loved that man. I feared him too – he wielded such power over all of us.
Mr Cassini had planned it all out for me. A Stone Age death for a Stone Age woman, he said. And that meant getting rid of her. He had already chosen a day. My task was simply to put a leaf in her hair, surreptitiously, and then draw attention to it, asking Mr Cassini, in public, how a leaf had become entangled in her tresses. Mr Cassini would seize upon this opportunity to accuse her of infidelity; she had lain in the grass with another man, they had consumed their passion under a tree. He would rip out the leaf and her hair with it. He would be justified in slaying her. It would be a crime of passion.
What can I say, except that Mrs Cassini is no more… and now her husband, Mr Cassini, is dead too. We will never make a sandcastle together again. We will never play in the caves.
5
THE TIDE GOES OUT
The Irish connection.
Caves – and a disappearance
I can’t remember Olly’s exact response when I told her about Mr Cassini. He was a dead monster: a pile of ashes in an urn in a grave in a mound in a dream.
‘Swivel on that, baby!’ I wiggled my hips and waggled my middle fingers at an imaginary crowd, imitating the once-famous goal celebration I trademarked in the glory-glory days. ‘Get out of that you big piece of shit!’
Olly pretended to laugh at my antics, but she didn’t celebrate much.
‘No more mad mannequin stories,’ I said. No more astrology, no more alchemy. No more crazy talk and no more confessions from PC 66 – there’s nothing worse than a bent copper.
‘Justice at last, even if we are dealing with a couple of fictional characters,’ I said.
‘You know something,’ said Olly, and I was looking at that sensuous mouth of hers, ‘I’ve a feeling that true justice only happens to people in stories. That’s what stories are for.’
I didn’t know what she meant by that.
‘Pardon?’
She looked tired. ‘Stories… isn’t that what they’re for? To get some sort of justice – I don’t think justice is possible in real life, do you? It’s just nominal. A symbol. There’s no such thing, really.’
That gave me plenty to think about as we got ready for another Mystery Quest – yes, we were off on another picnic. We’d decided to continue the Arthurian theme – our trip north had raised a hare so we gave chase.
‘We’ve started so we’ll finish,’ she said to me after our trip to Arthuret. The experience had intrigued her. Something to do with madness, perhaps – there was a tenuous link in that vein between Mr Cassini and Merlin. Madness as background hiss. Olly was disappointed I hadn’t given Mr Cassini a more dramatic death. She mentioned Michael the Scot.
‘Who?’
She told me about him – a twelfth-century translator and philosopher at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor, who became famous for his extraordinary metal helmet. Michael had a reputation as a wizard because he dabbled in astrology, astronomy and alchemy. He predicted that a falling stone would kill him – and he forecast its precise weight. He always wore his helmet as a precaution, except once, when he took it off before entering a church for mass. A stone fell from the ceiling and hit him, fatally, on the head.
‘That’s the sort of death he needed,’ said Olly.
It’s February. A jumbled-up jigsaw. Some days are blue and some days are grey, it’s hard to find a pattern. A fine rain is visibly rusting the landscape. The clouds drift slowly, skybergs in a long delirium… the mountain-tops are islands in pack ice. Blackbirds are ready to pair off and sing of love. Vixens fill the night with their ghostly shrieks. The wild daffodil – with its narcotic bulb – struggles airborne: it has spent the winter in the meadows of the underworld. Many ducks are already on their way to their Arctic breeding grounds. There’s a boat about to leave the harbour and I want to be on it too, I want to go somewhere that’s not here.
Snowdrops, which escaped from monastery gardens long ago (and which were worn as a sign of purity by village girls) huddle in clusters, war tents in a frosty battlefield. A few squirrels dig down for nuts hidden last autumn, though it’s clear from their errant scrapings that they have faulty memories, and many fail to find their hoards.
Memory. I’m still trying to find mine. The first ten years are lost. Should I continue my quest? Is it dangerous? And what exactly is memory?
Memory as a sheath – if the silkworm moth is allowed to emerge from its cocoon the silk becomes uncommercial, so the chrysalis is suffocated while it’s still inside its silkspun home.
Memory as an electric cable – sometimes underground, nearly always hidden, flexed for ease and convenience, always covered up and dangerous if exposed; useful yet dangerous, like water.
We’re going on a picnic, Olly and me, in the hills. Another wintry day has been delivered, wet and mucous, on the world’s maternity ward. The air is sharp and scentless. But we’re warm and cosy in Olly’s kitchen – she’s making sandwiches. The chopping board is all knives and crumbs. I know what you’re thinking – Olly is always the one who makes the sandwiches, but actually I make a pretty mean sandwich myself. It just so happens that she’s into making the sandwiches: I think it’s a way of keeping busy, keeping her mind off things. And since I gave you the recipe last time I shall do so this time too: peppered pastrami with green olives and baby tomatoes in a home-made dill pickle bread. Really yummy. To wet our whistles I’ve bought a bottle of Spatone water from Trefriw Wells Spa, a spring reputedly discovered by the tenth Roman legion. Mining debris closed the site until 1833, when ‘an aged inhabitant’ led Victorian entrepreneurs to the source of the iron-rich water, a spring gushing from a cave hewn nearly 40 feet into the rock; patients flocked to be cured of anaemia, skin diseases, indigestion, rheumatism, palsies, stomach disorders and nervous complaints.
Butties are much more enjoyable in the outdoors, and today we’re off to the wilds of Snowdonia. We’re going in her motor, and my first job is to haul a big dog-stinking blanket into the car and lay it on the back seat for her hound Gelert. Yet again I have to avert my eyes and suppress some wayward thoughts as she belts herself i
n and her scent drifts towards me. Today she has an Elastoplast on her neck, one of those long oblong strips, waterproof. I remark on it.
‘Spot gone septic,’ she says, wrinkling her nose and smirking disdainfully.
She’s run down, perhaps. Or the aliens have been down for another visit.
We start the journey, though Gelert has delayed us by steaming up the windows with his great lolling tongue. I smell a dog’s dinner – last night’s – in the air so I keep my window open. I daren’t say anything because she loves that hound more than anything or anyone, even her boyfriend Fit Boy. And talking of Fit Boy, I have a rendezvous with him tomorrow, when I’m due to take him to Holyhead. He’s taking a ferry over to Ireland – but more of that later.
It’s suddenly warmer this morning, after a cold snap, and a minor thaw is taking place. I see snow on the tops, and snowdrops under the trees, a spillage of milk in the crisp green grass. Full-bellied rivers ache with water. Reflected in a lake’s cold clarity, cotton-wool clouds, stained pink by the dawn, are surgical swabs stuck to gashes in the ravines. The air is very still; hardly a leaf moves as we coil upwards through the Llanberis Pass and then descend to the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel, base camp for the 1953 Everest Expedition when it trained in Snowdonia. The full name of this mountain pass is Pen-y-Gwryd-Cei. Cei was Arthur’s main man in North Wales; in the ancient story Culhwch ac Olwen he was a giant-slayer and Arthur’s foremost warrior. He could be as tall as the tallest tree in the forest. He had mystical powers and could hold his breath under water for nine days and nights. No physician could heal a wound from his sword. The heat from his body kept his companions warm on the coldest of nights.