Dee smiled. “If it brings you back to me, Philip, well and good. But it is a gift, understand that.” His smile widened. “And, of course, I have a copy.”
Sidney laughed. “I should know better than to underestimate you, sir. How did you come by it?”
Dee looked away, the smile vanishing. “From one now dead,” he said flatly, and Sidney understood. Edward Kelly had been a talented scryer. He had also been a most tempestuous, unstable personality... The thought made Sidney smile a little: the description sounded not unlike Master Marlowe. Kelly had sought to reach beyond the bounds God had set on his power. It had driven him quite beyond himself, and beyond the help of any man. Dee’s association with Kelly had caused many to damn the older magician as a necromancer—and was also the source of Dee’s wry certainty that he was naive in the matters of men. Scientia gratis scientiae was not a code by which many men lived, and those who did not could hardly be expected to comprehend those who did. Sidney’s face hardened. Kelly was well lost, may God forgive me for thinking so. Like Nimue, he had used his teacher, and then had done his best to destroy him with what he had learned. I can only hope, Sidney thought, that I’ve done something to even the balance so far as Ned Kelly is concerned.
“Forgive me, Doctor. It was none of my affair.”
“Nonsense, Philip,” Dee said. He spoke briskly now, shaking off memory. “You confided to me your acquisition of Virgil’s texts, even let me see them. I did not, by the way, give Lord Burleigh any notion of their existence, let alone that you possessed them.”
For a moment, Sidney stared at his old teacher, then relaxed with a small laugh. “Why do you still have the power to surprise me? I should know you well enough by now to know I oughtn’t be surprised by anything.”
“I’m gratified. It makes me think I’m not yet quite ready for the grave, if I can still elicit that wary expression of yours. It’s rather delightful for an old man. Tell me,” Dee said, and seated himself again behind his desk, regretful memories banished, “you will be bringing the Virgil with you?”
“I had thought of leaving it with you, doctor,” Sidney began, but Dee leaned back, shaking his head.
“Very flattering, Philip, but you may dispense with that, it’s pure nonsense. Ever since my neighbors burned my laboratory, I’ve known better than to leave anything of such value here. No, you’ll take it with you, along with the St. Dunstan. You’ll need them both, I fear.”
Sidney nodded, and the two men sat in silence for a while, listening to the spring wind in the trees outside, and the distant rush of the river. Occasionally, there was the sound of a child’s laughter—one of Dee’s grandchildren, Sidney thought. The whole day was peaceful, calm, utterly and perfectly natural, in the most arcane senses of the word. And utterly unlike the day at Penshurst when he had first become alerted to the trouble in the air. This was a day when one could relax and breathe, and thank God for such moments, and for His gifts, for the friendship of good men, learned men, whose own love and zeal for the knowledge God hid in His earth was not deterred by the intolerant.
He closed his eyes for a moment. I have three homes, he thought. Penshurst, Wilton, and here at Mortlake.
Again, he heard the sound of distant laughter. He smiled slightly, and then he heard it more clearly. His eyes snapped open, his heart racing. It was no child’s laughter he heard this time, nor was it audible to human ears. He had heard it, as talent heard, within, with an acuity of the soul. ‘Fear God and fear knowledge,’ a voice whispered. ‘I am ill-opposed by such as you. Rest easy, then. Little as you disturb my sleeps, shall I disturb your meager life. Rest easy, slave of the Four, poor chattel of the Pale One. Rest easy, rest, and you shall surrender.’
Dee frowned, recognizing that there was something there, but the words were for Sidney’s ears alone. Sidney shook his head slightly in negation. “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” he murmured, and the presence was gone, withdrawing before it could be banished, and laughing as it went.
“Human,” Dee said sourly. “Powerful, talented, perverted—but human. Hubris, I’ve found—and remember this, Philip—tends to be a particularly human failing. Demons and fiends are proud, but rarely hubristic.”
“I can see that,” Sidney said. He raised a hand: it was trembling. Somehow, knowing that whatever it was he would face was human comforted him not a whit. It staggered him that any mortal man could command the power he had felt behind this intrusion.
Dee saw the pale, strained look on the younger man’s face, and shook his head. “Philip, nonsense. I know of a dozen men with such capability—but they are good men who would not employ it wantonly. And among that number, Philip, you are one of the greatest. Always let your enemy underestimate you. Therein lies your strength. That was how that charge of yours succeeded at Zutphen, wasn’t it? Four hundred men against six thousand? David against Goliath is still David.”
Silently, Sidney nodded, but his heart wasn’t in it. How could he explain to Dee that what gripped him now was not fear, precisely—or rather that it was not fear of the power facing him, but fear of the exultation that sang within him at the thought of the confrontation? This strange presence had touched a chord with him, and his power had answered—still in opposition, true, but Sidney knew that the potential for a fall as brilliant as Lucifer’s lay within him, as great as the talent Dee said was his. For a grim moment, Sidney envied the papists, with their comfortable rite of laying the burdens of one’s soul on another. He sighed, shaking the thought away, and lifted the St. Dunstan.
Dee frowned slightly. “You’re welcome to stay here, Philip.”
“Actually, I’m staying with Robert, in the city. And besides, I have this mad impulse to keep moving. I don’t know. It may not be sound strategy, but it’s how I felt in Holland, and it’s how I feel now. Just keep moving and don’t look to either side.” Sidney smiled suddenly, almost impishly. “Panic, I think it’s called.”
Dee studied him suspiciously for an instant, and then his face eased into a rather sheepish grin. He picked up the bell that stood on his desk and rang it. A few moments later, the eldest grandson entered. “Tell your mother she’s to see that Sir Philip’s boat is ready.”
The boy, a sturdy child of eight or nine, bobbed an ungraceful bow and vanished. Dee held out his hands to Sidney.
“Do give my regards to your family, and to Lady Sidney, of course. God go with you, Philip. He is not unknown in Scotland, though to judge from recent events, one might wonder.”
Sidney raised an eyebrow. “You reassure me no end,” he said drily. He bowed over the old man’s hands, but Dee forestalled him, and kissed him on the forehead.
“My blessings as well, my son. Come back safely.”
Sidney nodded mutely, and tucked the St. Dunstan carefully under his arm. The door opened again, and the child appeared, nervously clearing his throat.
“Excuse me, Grandfather, but Mother says Sir Philip’s boat is waiting.”
“Thank you,” Dee said, austerely, but there was a twinkle in his eye. “Make your bow to Sir Philip. You may show him the way to the dock, if you like.”
“Oh, yes!” The boy—Sidney could not remember his name, though he knew he had been told it more than once—controlled himself instantly, and managed a hasty reverence.
Dee lifted an eyebrow, and Sidney said hastily, “Thank you, that would be very kind.” He was very aware, as he followed the boy through the halls and across the beautifully kept lawn toward the dock, of the child’s awed, sidelong glances, and did all he could to keep from laughing. Such hero-worship was almost silly, when the child had Dee for a grandsire.
Sidney left Mortlake in a thoughtful mood, and strangely exhilarated. It was the same kind of madness that had seized him at Zutphen, and which was channeled and transmuted into something more decorous for the Accession Day Tilts. It was something to have seen that his enemy was also human. It troubled him not at all that his opponent seemed scornful of his abilities. Sidn
ey smiled wryly then. Well, perhaps it did trouble him somewhat, but he would be damned if he would admit it.
He leaned back against the cushions of the barge, listening to the call of the stroke oarsman, and the birdlike cries of the other boats making their way along the busy Thames. It was a warm afternoon, unusually so for April, and he lifted his face to the sunlight, of a color and intensity in and about London that was unlike anywhere else in the world. It had been too long since he had last visited London, not since the most recent Tilts last November. The winter had been a busy one at Penshurst; but now he had the excuse, and if he was shortly to be banished to Scotland, albeit on the Queen’s business, Sidney had every intention of enjoying the city while he had the chance. Robert, bless him, shared his love for the city; not for him the suburbs of Mortlake or Chelsea. Robert lived as close to the heart of the city as one could and still maintain a household suitable to a gentleman.
The barge slowed, creeping through the heavy traffic of the city proper, then angled across the current toward the dock below Robert’s town house. Sidney sighed, and then his eye caught sight of the flag, snapping in the freshening afternoon breeze along the bank side. It stirred a feeling of defiance within Sidney, and he leaned forward to direct the barge-master to dock there, rather than at the house. The man gave a long-suffering sigh—he had to work the barge back across the current and through the swarms of lesser craft—but was too well trained to protest. Sidney leaned back again. If he returned to the house now, he would likely run into Robert, and he owed Robert, as next senior member of the family, a complete explanation of what was happening... He deliberately pushed all thoughts of the matter in hand from his mind, and grinned. If I don’t disturb your sleeps, see how little you trouble my days. Such a cheap activity, play-going. Yet I rank it rather above troubling about you.
There was a goodly crowd at the theater when he arrived. In one of the galleries, he saw a knot of acquaintances, Fynes Morrison among them. Morrison saw him, and beckoned him over to join them. It had been some time since Sidney had seen the inveterate traveler, so he slid into the seat cleared for him.
“Philip, my sparrow, you’ve been disputing with her majesty again,” were Morrison’s first words as Sidney sat down.
“I’m in London still, so I fail to follow your reasoning,” Sidney replied.
“Scotland, Philip. She’d hardly have sent you unless you’d irked her again. Will you never grow out of this precocious idealism of yours?”
Sidney hid a sigh. Court gossip had always travelled fast, but this seemed almost indecently rapid. “Not so long as it serves a purpose,” he said. “And her majesty seems to be under the impression that she’s doing me an honor by giving me this embassage. So I believe her.”
“You would, Phiisides. Well, I suppose it’s better than London in the summer. Oh, good Lord, another history.
“First Marlowe and his Edward—can’t keep his personal life off the stage, can that one? —and now this. Richard II. Not much blood and thunder there.”
“Fynes, why don’t you go down and stand with the groundlings so you can throw apples at the players? You’d be much more in your element.”
George Chapman wedged his solid bulk in between Morrison and a support beam, and grinned across at Sidney. For all that the poet was a member of Raleigh’s School of Night, and thus an advocate of a magic darker than any Sidney trusted, Sidney found himself smiling back at him. “G’den, Philip. What make you with this lackwit who can write about only what he sees?”
“Oh, old affections die slowly,” Sidney said, and allowed his smile to become virtuous. Morrison drew an indignant breath, and Sidney sat back to enjoy the sparks.
“The words are at least my own, George. I don’t need to steal from the ancients. Besides, if people can’t read Homer in the original, they don’t deserve to.”
“Like an English prayer book?” Sidney asked innocently, then sat back with his hands clasped around his good knee as the players’ boy appeared with the placard that announced the start of the play.
For the next three hours, Sidney did not have to make any effort to put the Scottish question from his mind, and he ignored both the occasional comments of his friends and the mercifully infrequent interpolations from the crowd below. He watched and listened, sometimes closing his eyes the better to hear the flow of words, and fought to kill a canker of envy that had started to gnaw within him. There was no doubt that the man was a poet. The language was exquisite, as worthy of print as of the stage; still, Shakespeare was no slave to his words, as Marlowe could be, but made them instead the finest of tools.
I will have to revise my own printed opinion of the theater, Sidney thought, remotely, watching Richard’s child-queen move delicately across the stage, the boy maneuvering the old-fashioned Spanish farthingale with practiced skill. The Defense of Poesie did not go far enough—these new conventions are as worthy as any of the Greeks’. My defense lacked scope... He sighed. He doubted that Stephen Gossen—and Thomas Greene; it really was amazing that the most vocal critics of plays and playwrights tended to be lesser specimens of the breed—had grown any less reactionary over the years. Besides, he added, with a faint, devilish grin, it was always pleasant to fly in the face of those who expected him to disapprove. Especially those so-called puritans who, unlike Sidney, who styled himself one, forgot the joy of grace, the inherent joy of the Lord and His gifts.
He stared at the bare stage, the flow of language, the actors’ gestures, transforming it into the final terrible cell beneath Pontefract Castle, then to Windsor and the final scene, so bitingly accurate, of the gratitude of princes and Bolingbroke’s secure remorse, his enemy dead. Shakespeare’s was indeed a divine gift. The play ended, and the company’s oldest member stepped forward in his proper person to speak the brief tag. Sidney joined in the enthusiastic applause, but shook his head in response to Chapman’s invitation to join him at the Anchor, the most expensive of the theater taverns. Instead, he sat for a long moment, letting the brightly dressed gentry folk who could afford the expense of a gallery seat push out past him, considering what he had just seen. It was an oddly disturbing play—fully satisfying, he amended immediately, but still disturbing, and not merely because Shakespeare’s Richard was, despite his faults, an attractive man. A weak king was a liability and a danger to the land, but usurpation was an uneasy matter. Had Marlowe, perhaps, feared the inherent uncertainty of the subject? Sidney wondered suddenly. His Edward II, for all it dealt with rebellion against and the unsavory murder of a weak king, had concluded with the true king firmly on his father’s throne. Had he felt a need for the proprieties after all?
Sidney shook himself almost angrily, hating what he had to do. Usurpation was, simply speaking, dangerous ground, especially this usurpation, and especially now. England rejoiced in the reign of her Gloriana. It was a period of wealth, an achievement unseen before in England, the great dangers that had threatened at the beginning of the realm had been resoundingly defeated—yet there were always worms in the bud. Caterpillars of the commonwealth, Sidney thought, rolling the player’s phrase in his mind, and then remembered that Gossen had used the phrase before that, though to far different intent. He pushed himself to his feet, sighing a little as he realized how his leg had stiffened up again, and made his way through the jostling crowd to the tiring house.
Even those in the company who did not know him recognized quality, as who would not, when these companies lived in the hopes of a great man’s patronage and commissions, or in fear of an attack. Most did remember him, of course—Sidney had always taken an interest in the players, and had stood godfather to the son of the great comedian Richard Tarleton some years before—and broke off their own busy conversations to offer carefully polite greetings. Sidney had a reputation as a tolerant patron, but he was also the first gentleman of Europe, and no one would willingly offend so open-handed a man.
Sidney made his way slowly through the tiring house, his progress impeded by th
e hampers of costume and the stacked props, and by the need to respond to each man who spoke to him. At last he found Shakespeare, sitting on a battered-looking hamper at the back of the room, helping the young boy who’d played Richard’s queen free himself from the awkward farthingale. The boy wrestled himself out of the wired underskirt, leaving himself naked except for drawers and a pair of patched and none too clean stockings, then stood staring open-mouthed at the newcomer.
Sidney hid his grin, and said, “Good evening, Willem.” Shakespeare looked up, and smiled in pleasure. He tossed the boy’s shirt to him, and rose to his feet. “Sir Philip, this is an honor. Welcome. Would you care for some ale, sir?”
“In a bit, Willem. I’d like to talk to you, if I might. Will you walk with me?”
The playwright looked shrewdly at Sidney, who continued to smile pleasantly, and sighed almost imperceptibly, reaching down to do up the last buttons of his sober doublet. “Of course, sir. Dickon!” There was no answer to the randomly directed shout, and he looked quickly around the crowded room. “Dickon?”
An arm waved above the heads, and then Burbage waded through the chaos to join them, silver-laced ruff discarded, shirt undone, and bare-legged, a sweating pitcher in his right hand and a sheaf of papers in his left. He wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve as he approached, but Sidney politely ignored the gesture.
“Sir Philip.” The player’s nod was more than half a bow, and he glared at Shakespeare, who seemed unaware of it, or of any reason for it.
“Master Burbage,” Sidney acknowledged. “A beautiful performance.”
“Thank you, Sir Philip. It’s a beautiful piece, of course. Nothing without Will.”
The Armor of Light Page 6